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

by David Turell , Saturday, November 25, 2017, 15:49 (2553 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I have not changed from my contention that God prefers to evolve life's forms. That is common descent! What I throw out is Darwin's survival of the fittest, which implies a struggle for survival. That Darwin concept means improvements beyond the level of survival appear for no good reason for survival but appear anyway. Our brain is a prime example, multicellularity another. As I've told you before, your Darwin background is an impediment to your thinking.

dhw: A strange response! You ask me to “throw out Darwin theory completely”, and when I refuse to throw out common descent, which lies at the heart of his theory, you say you mean survival of the fittest. Why bring Darwin into the discussion at all? You are discussing this with me, not with Darwin, and in any case you know perfectly well that I add improvement to survival, do not believe in Darwin’s gradualism or random mutations, and am a devoted follower of Margulis’s theory that evolution depends just as much on cooperation as on competition.

Your response is strange. I did not ask you to throw out Darwin completely, only his insistence on the struggle to survive. Note the new thread on subterranean organisms who live easily in very difficult circumstances. By the way Margulis did not consider God in her atheistic approach.

dhw: Meanwhile, anyone who believes in God and believes in evolution will agree with you that God prefers to evolve life’s forms through an evolutionary process. The discussion is for what purpose and how he uses the process (if he exists). Fulminating against Darwin may be a useful diversion from the anomalies that riddle your hypothesis, but it provides no evidence for your contention that your God preprogrammed or dabbled every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct in order to keep life going so that the preprogrammed or dabbled brain of Homo sapiens could finally appear. And it is no answer to my alternative proposal, with which you can find no fault as an explanation of evolutionary history.

I'm not fulminating against Darwin, just pointing out his errors, caused by theorizing at a time he did not have the knowledge we have now. Not his fault. And your alternative is God lite, without accepting God. An alternative God approach is still God.