autonomy v. automaticity (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, February 16, 2018, 14:57 (2470 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I don’t know why you always pick on survival and leave out improvement! So don’t you regard the human brain as an improvement over, say, the chimp brain? And you have missed out the first part of the problem, which is the sheer illogicality of your God taking all the trouble to personally design the weaverbird’s nest and millions of other natural wonders extant and extinct over 3.x thousand million years, when all he wants to do is produce sapiens’ brain. (That's when you defend your hypothesis by claiming God's logic is different from ours.) And you have already agreed that complexity for its own sake without a purpose makes no sense.

DAVID: There is obvious improvement within any drive for complexity. Complexity explains the arrival of the unexpected (human brains) and unreasonable (whales), which you ignore. Complexity has purpose, the human brain, and no sense, the whales. You are cherry picking my comments.

dhw: I have never ignored the complexity of whales, and am continually disputing what you claim to be its unreasonableness. There is nothing unreasonable about an animal changing its environment in order to improve its chances of survival, and then stage by stage adapting itself to the new conditions. You simply refuse to countenance that reasoning because you are fixed in your belief that your God transformed the pre-whale in advance of its entering the water, and so the different stages make no sense to you (= “unreasonable”).

And it makes no sense to me to assume that each stage (which are giant gaps in form and function)in whale evolution occurred by chance or by committees of whale cells working out the complex designs of the new forms on their own. Only God fits and I am 'fixed' there