Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, October 20, 2017, 18:12 (2589 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I was comparing them to the apes, who started as we did but have not changed, yet survive. A different view than yours.

dhw: I can hardly disagree that apes are apes and humans are humans and both have survived. What I don’t understand is why my brain and hand are an “over-improvement”. I consider them to be an improvement, in keeping with my argument that evolution develops through a drive for survival and/or improvement.

You have a very different view of survival than I. Our improvements were obviously not necessary for survival compared to apes. They are here without changes. Therefore there is a drive for complexity even if not necessary for survival.

DAVID: How do you know it is uncontrolled? You assume it.

dhw: Agreed, since none of us “know” anything. However, I can see absolutely no evidence that every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct has evolved in accordance with an overall plan of any kind other than the production of the vast variety of innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct. In particular I’m disputing the relevance of your “balance of nature” argument to your insistence that the whole of evolution was "controlled" so that it would lead to the production of humans.

You have no answer for the sudden and dramatic arrival of hominins to humans over eight million years. My answer is control by God.

dhw: [...] so far the only serious purposes you have come up with are that he wants us to think of him, and he wants to have a relationship with us (although he remains hidden), and so he had to create/preprogramme eight stages of whale and the weaverbird’s nest and the duck-billed platypus, because how else could an all-powerful God have kept life going until he produced the one thing he really wanted to produce? And you claim that this is a logical interpretation of history.

DAVID: I certainly think it is perfectly logical. You don't. All of this refers to balance of nature to supply the energy for evolution to continue.

dhw: It is perfectly logical to say that life needs energy to continue. That has nothing to do with your anthropocentric interpretation of life’s history. But if you really and truly believe that your God could not have produced humans and could not have had his relationship with us (while remaining hidden) if he hadn’t taught the weaverbird to build its nest, so be it.

The bush of life presents no problem to me.