An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, July 23, 2018, 15:27 (2313 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: As explained before I view the term common descent in a specific way, which is obviously not your definition. Life started as single cells and in stages of increasing complexity reached humans with subsequent stages based on previous ones. God guided it continuously or intermittently. Your common descent differs how? Because you think it is all natural? My 'evolution' looks just like yours.

dhw: Of course it looks like mine! We both believe that life started with single cells and became increasingly complex, developing not just into humans but into every single species that ever existed! But you refuse to recognize that separate creation is the direct opposite of common descent, and you claim that the Cambrian was separate creation, and your use of terms like “dabble”, “guide”, “step in” therefore also suggests separate creation which you now say may have been continuous. In fact your concept of God’s “guidance” (which may = separate creation) applies not only to speciation but also to every lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life. God “steps in” to design them all. The discussion is not about how evolution “looks”, but how it happened, and your view is that your God may have done it all by separate creation, or some of it by separate creation, although you believe in common descent, but you are not fence sitting.

Our difference is in the definition of the term 'common descent'. From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent

"Evidence of common descent of living organisms has been discovered by scientists researching in a variety of disciplines over many decades, demonstrating that all life on Earth comes from a single ancestor."

This could have been done by God and still be common descent by definition.

DAVID: Here you are equating enormous species change in whale stages as simple adaptations! You are as usual reverting to Darwin.

dhw: You are discussing this with me, not with Darwin. I never said the changes were simple, and as always I qualified my argument by acknowledging that it is a hypothesis, as there is no proof that the cell communities are capable of major innovations.

Thank you.

DAVID: We all know there is no proof. Some of us want a reasonable explanation, not fence sitting.

dhw: I consider adaptations as evidence of cellular intelligence, and so the hypothesis that the cell communities are also capable of major innovations seems to me at least as reasonable as the hypothesis that these came about through random mutations, or that an unknown designer fiddled with the anatomy of pre-whales before they entered the water, and then kept fiddling and fiddling, because he needed all these changes to provide food so that life could continue until he was able to produce the brain of Homo sapiens.

Back on the fence.