Evolution: common descent not shown by genetics (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 31, 2018, 14:10 (2487 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I was discussing human 'vestigial'. I agree blind cave fish show reverse evolution. Adds no clue as to how speciation occurs.

In case you hadn’t noticed, humans are not the only organisms on this planet, and Darwin uses vestigial structures as evidence for common descent, not for speciation. You and I disagree with his hypothesis that this is caused by random mutations.

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.
Dhw: […] 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: You don't know that God wished to 'enable it to survive until it didn't survive'. God controlled evolution which more than implies He arranged for extinctions as well as evolutionary complexity drive. I look at outcomes of evolution to indicate purpose, which does not read his mind as you do.

None of us “know” what happened, or what God’s intentions may have been, if he exists. But if he does, it is perfectly obvious that organisms survive until they don’t survive, and if God is in control, it makes perfect sense that this is what he wanted! I also look at “outcomes of evolution” to indicate purpose, and I have proposed a purpose which you have agreed fits in perfectly with the outcomes of evolution. We cannot speculate on a being’s purpose without trying to read his mind. If you say his purpose was to produce the human brain, that means he was thinking to himself: “I wanner produce the human brain.” Stop kidding yourself that your efforts to explain evolution are any different in approach from my own.

DAVID: Certainly doesn't explain the whales and their complicated physiology popping up entirely unexplained.
dhw: You keep admitting that you can’t explain it. I can, hypothetically (which is all anyone can do at the moment)....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: Intelligent cells as your Darwinist scientists tell you have intelligent responses to stimuli, which cannot extrapolate to committees designing new forms. They never have suggested that. It is your supposition.

My hypothesis (not supposition) explains what yours does not, and so you ignore the logic of the explanation and revert to the same point I have agreed to again and again: we don’t know if cells are capable of innovation, and that is why it is a hypothesis. If nobody else has suggested it, good for me. That does not mean it’s wrong.

DAVID: God chose to evolve every form is my answer.

And why is that a more scientific answer than God chose to enable organisms to evolve their own forms?

dhw: 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.
DAVID: Yes, just wishful thinking.

No wishes involved – just an honest attempt to find an explanation that will fit the history of life as we think we know it. Some folk might say that it’s “wishful thinking” for someone to believe that God evolved every form for the purpose of keeping life going so that he could produce the brain of David Turell, dhw et al.