Evolution and humans: big brain size uses energy (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 11, 2017, 15:03 (2567 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You refuse to accept the idea that God uses evolution in everything He creates. You are describing His process. Just as you don't understand the necessity for planning and design for speciation.

dhw: If God exists, and since I believe that evolution happened, then of course he would have used evolution, and I suggest that what he created was a mechanism that provided a vast higgledy-piggledy bush of organisms extant and extinct. You refuse to accept the idea that God might have WANTED a higgledy-piggledy bush of organisms extant and extinct, instead of wanting only one species and going all round a billion mulberry bushes to get it.

Once again you have skipped over the issue of food supply. If evolution had to occur then everyone has to have food to survive and balance of nature does that. If God simply created us and nothing else, do we eat each other?

dhw: I understand the necessity for design for speciation, and suggest that cell communities (perhaps endowed by your God with their intelligence) do the designing. I do not accept that every step of speciation had to be planned 3.8 billion years ago or dabbled in advance.

Design is required to create new species. Sorry you can't see that.

DAVID: At the level of adaptation I agree with you. But at speciation I disagree. Reviving the whale issue: just because the water was there doesn't mean they should have jumped in and change to a fish like form. The issue is the impediment of the enormous form and physiologic changes required.

dhw: (No other reasons for adaptation, then?) As I keep saying, it is often difficult to draw a line between adaptation and speciation – the whale being a prime example.

I don't know why you can't see a difference in adaptation and speciation. Adaptation is a minor change in an existing form. A new species has great differences in form and function and requires design and planning to achieve it.

dhw:I very much doubt that pre-whales would have said to themselves: “The water is there so let’s jump in.” It seems more likely they would have said, “There ain’t enough food here on the land, but there’s a helluva lot in the water, so let’s go get it.”

How much swimming have you done? Haven't you found it hard work, as a mammal, to move around quickly which is required to catch a prey? (I've used swimming as a physical training method for years because of that fact.)

dhw:I find that more feasible than imagining God preprogramming their eight stages 3.8 billion years ago, or dabbling with one part of their anatomy and saying, “Now go into the water for no particular reason” and then pulling them out again (or diving in himself) eight times to do more fiddles.

You are just as confused as I am about whales.

DAVID: The Cambrian explosion, bipedalism, the human brain are all part of the history of God's evolutionary process and show His abilities. The limits may be that He has to use evolution, not direct creation with stages of life, and creates one species after an other to reach His goal.

dhw: We know they are all parts of the history, and according to you he can create directly when he wants to (early Cambrian) but otherwise can’t when he wants to (humans).

The Cambrian starts abruptly and fits the concept of God's direct creation. But that was the same as God starting original life. Evidence He creates new beginnings of evolution and then evolves subsequent forms. He started bipedalism and then proceeded with an evolution of hominin forms. Fits history exactly.