Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, October 21, 2017, 14:52 (2588 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
DAVID: 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.

I did not say our improved brains and hands were necessary for survival. I said they were an improvement, which alongside survival I see as the driving force of evolution. And you still haven’t explained what you mean by “over-improvement”.

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

You have no answer to any of the conundrums raised by your hypothesis (see below). And you have apparently forgotten that my theistic hypothesis to explain the “sudden and dramatic” arrival of many-stage hominins/humans and eight-stage whales and of all the new species that suddenly and dramatically appeared during the Cambrian, and indeed of all species suddenly or not so suddenly extant and extinct, is that your God created a mechanism (cellular intelligence) that enabled organisms to work out their own methods of survival and/or improvement, and that the rate at which this happened depended on the nature of environmental change and the extent of cellular intelligence in the respective organisms.

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.
DAVID: The bush of life presents no problem to me.

No, your problem, as I see it, is trying to find any coherent connection between the divinely constructed weaverbird’s nest etc., the “balance of nature” (which simply means life continues one way or another), your God’s roundabout way of fulfilling his prime purpose (producing the brain of Homo sapiens) though you believe the Cambrian shows he can produce species instantaneously, and his wanting a relationship with us but remaining hidden.