Evolution: common descent not shown by genetics (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 30, 2018, 12:44 (2278 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Studies of DNA at various levels of evolution do not fit common descent:
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/evolution-youre-drunk

dhw: Darwin: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…” The alternative “few forms” is important in the context of this article.

DAVID: You can't deny that evolution proceeded from simple to very complex even though we see back and forth. Darwin added that quote above only after his first addition created so much furor.

Re complexity see later (and also under “chimps\r\not us"). As for Darwin, I am pointing out that the article is wrong: he offered the alternative of “a few forms”, and that alternative offers an explanation for possible different lines of descent. Please focus on the arguments.

Dhw: Casey is a “he” apparently.
DAVID: The author of the article is AMY. My comment is about the article and HER obvious prejudice.

Sorry, I thought you were attacking Casey Dunn.

dhw: […] Dunn’s link with the environment is crucial. Reversal is nothing new. Darwin regards vestigial organs as evidence for common descent, and this might give us a clue as to how the whole process works.
DAVID: Darwin's vestigial organs are not vestigial: for example the appendix has definite reasons for existing. Current research shows nothing considered vestigial by early human thought is vestigial.

Says who? Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigiality
“Vestigial characters are present throughout the animal kingdom, and an almost endless list could be given.”
Examples begin with ostrich and emu wings, cavefish eyes etc. etc. etc.

dhw: Complexity in itself is therefore irrelevant: the decisive factor is change that will improve the organism’s chances of survival and/or way of life. Once cells joined themselves into communities, they had an almost infinite potential of forms – some simple, some complex. Hence the ever changing bush, with organisms coming and going, complexifying or simplifying, as they coped or failed to cope with or exploited the ever changing environment. Why must God guide it all? If he exists, he would have invented the mechanism that gave rise to this vast potential and hence to the ever changing bush.

DAVID: I'm happy to know that God would have given autonomy to organisms to survive easily by modifying themselves. You've entered His mind when no one else has.

So when you tell us that God personally preprogrammed or dabbled every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in order to provide energy to keep life going until he could produce the brain of Homo sapiens, you are not entering his mind? And you actually believe this, whereas at least I acknowledge that my proposal is a hypothesis. And who said anything about surviving easily? As you say in your next comment, 99% didn’t survive. That makes even more nonsense of your hypothesis. Your God deliberately preprogrammed or dabbled every life form to enable it to survive until it didn’t survive!

DAVID: Certainly doesn't explain the whales and their complicated physiology popping up entirely unexplained.

You keep admitting that you can’t explain it. I can, hypothetically (which is all anyone can do at the moment). Pre-whales entered the water, probably because they were having problems finding food on land, and found the new environment improved their chances of survival. Every subsequent stage of their evolution would have been a new adaptation to aquatic life. One might have expected your God to get it all perfect at one go – just as one might have have expected him to produce the one brain he wanted instead of messing around for millions of years with all the hominids and hominins’ brains. But it takes time for the intelligent cell communities that make up individual hominins and pre-whales to come up with new ideas.

DAVID: And remember 99% didn't survive! But complexity got more and more complex as time passed even if there was a back and forth. Note the article points out genetic studies do not support common descent, which means there was another actor, God, stepping in to run the show.

I did remember, and frequently have to remind you of it. The higgledy-piggledy back-ing and forth-ing once again provides massive problems for the hypothesis that your God – who is sometimes in full control but sometimes thwarted by his own limitations, depending on the problems I raise – only wanted to produce the brain of Homo sapiens. Genetic studies would support Darwin’s alternative “few forms”, which the author failed to notice. Even if there was only one, you could argue that it must have been complex, and right from the word go, the process of simplification/complexification got underway as its descendants were exposed to different environments. There is no need for God to run the show if he deliberately started it off by giving organisms the wherewithal to simplify/complexify and run the show themselves, leaving him – in your own words – to watch with interest. Just another hypothesis, of course.