Natures wonders: porpoise sonar II (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 11, 2018, 15:26 (2506 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Thank you for another great post, spoilt only by your usual snipe at Darwin and totally ignoring the alternative hypothesis of cellular intelligence that I keep offering. So I suppose you think bat and porpoise echolocation, like the weaverbird’s nest, the camouflaged cuttlefish and the skull-shrinking shrew, was preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago as an essential part of God’s plan to keep life going till he could produce the brain of Homo sapiens. Ah, where would we have been without echolocation? You snipe, I snipe.

DAVID: Poor Darwin didn't know what he didn't know. Not his fault. I snipe at Darwin worshipers who still believe his whole swiss-cheese theory. Only common descent survives. His propposed mechanism of descent is in tatters.

I agree that random mutations provide an extremely unsatisfactory explanation for the almost indescribable complexities involved in evolutionary history. But I’m afraid the substitution of a theory that some unknown power preprogrammed every detail 3.8 billion years ago in order to keep life going until it could produce the one thing it wanted to produce – the human brain – leaves me with the same feeling that there simply has to be a better explanation!

DAVID's addendum comment: A perfect example of convergence, championed by Conway Morris as indicating evolution is pre-determined, shown in his book: Life's Solution; Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. It states there is an underlying pattern to evolution leading to intelligence. As a scientist his work does not show God, but he is known to be a believer.

I don’t doubt convergence. It stands to reason that intelligent organisms confronted with similar problems will come up with similar solutions.