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

by David Turell , Sunday, November 12, 2017, 16:03 (2566 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: 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: And yet again the answer is that food supply is necessary for ALL organisms.... Even today, I doubt if you would eat a weaverbird’s nest, or a wasp that laid its eggs on a spider’s back, or a skull-shrinking shrew. And if they and we disappeared, life would still go on with a new “balance of nature”.

Your answer ignores the eco-niche of each area of balance. I eat in my own.

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

dhw: “I understand the necessity for design for speciation” means I think design is required for speciation. Where we disagree is on the how and when. No, I do not see that the design for evefy single speciation has to be accomplished by a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or by divine dabbling BEFORE conditions demand or allow the major changes that lead to speciation. I propose that intelligent cell communities RESPOND to new conditions by redesigning themselves, either by adaptation or by speciation.

You seem to misunderstand the meaning of 'design'. Design requires planning to cerate a working design for a new organism.

DAVID: 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: The difference is between minor and major changes, and the borderlines are not always clear (e.g. the whale). My hypothesis proposes that both are RESPONSES to new conditions: yes to design, and no to advance planning.

As above designing must involve advanced planning before design is created. And you are forgetting the huge gaps in the fossil record, which is especially seen in the whale series in which each step is so different from the past one.

DAVID: 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: Polar bears are mammals and catch their prey, but you have missed the point as usual. Pre-whales may well have found it hard work to catch their prey in water. But when they decided that a life on the ocean wave was better for them than starving on dry land, the evolutionary mechanism would have got to work. Stage by stage (eight counted so far) they became more and more suited to marine life. The process is called evolution.

Polar bears are still polar bears after 150,000 years, evolving from brown bears. And you know that mammals made their own decision to enter the water. Perhaps God made the decision for them by transforming them in stages.

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.
DAVID: You are just as confused as I am about whales.

dhw: I know you are confused about whales. What is confusing about the process I have described above?

The process is exactly what I propose. God-directed change.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: Why “but” that was the same? If he could create directly then, what stopped him from creating directly later on? What is the explanation that “fits history exactly”? You have simply described history: new forms evolve into different forms. How does that explain why your God, who is able to create what he wants directly, created a billion forms, lifestyles and natural wonders that have no conceivable link to the production of Homo sapiens? Suggestion: he WANTED the higgledy-piggledy bush, and not just Homo sapiens. Is that not a feasible theistic explanation of the higgledy-piggledy bush?

Because history shows what history shows. God prefers starting stages and then evolving. Fits history perfectly. In the bush you are trying to interpret His mind. I just read history.