An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Friday, July 27, 2018, 01:51 (2310 days ago) @ David Turell

David: Since I don't follow the Bible I thought inexactly about the Bible's meaning of separate creation as you describe it. I had in mind stepwise creation as in evolution rather than totally separate individual creation implied in the Bible.

Tony: It was both stepwise and creation. I think part of the issue is that you are looking at life as independent, and it isn't. It isn't something that could just happen, nor did its happening fail to make an impact.

Agreed

Tony: Let's assume for a moment there is/was a plan, but agree not to speculate the future of that plan for a moment. All that is relevant is that the sequence of events, and the timing of them, was according to plan.

So earth is there, barren, formless, devoid of life. Much like any other planet in the universe. For whatever reason, this planet was picked. Planetary processes were kicked off, heat, gas, water vapor forming the atmosphere.

Earth was picked because it had all the attributes the Earth has, unless you imply it was specially made the way it is. Its especialness requires our solar system in the formation.

Tony: All good, but the plan needs life, and the planet won't sustain the next stage. So, Kickstart the process with plant life to fix the atmosphere, regulate temperatures, soil binding and breaking(all that yummy volcanic stone to digest).

David: The first were photosynthetic cells which eventually became plants.

Agreed. I honestly imagine that Earth's early atmosphere would have been too toxic for most cellular life.

I'm going to coin a new phrase or two for this discussion "Evolutionary Potential". Let's call that the maximum upward mobility potential for a particular "seed species". A seed species, as I am using it, is a new, novel form that would require an information increase in the genome, most likely coupled Quality and Timing Control mechanisms that had not previously existed in a lineage.

What if God created a small number of seed species, with enough information in them to allow for limited future development, and allowed them to do their thing on earth for a time before planting new seed species. The reason for the limitation is not a limitation on God, but of the environment itself. If he had allowed the genetic information to be released to early, there would most likely be a catastrophic outcome as changes in organisms become incompatible with the environment. So, these limitations on a seed species are the boundaries of its evolutionary potential. New seed species are direct creations. All the variants of them would essentially follow what we actually see in the genetic record.

The first photosynthetic cell would have likely been necessarily limited to, at most, the cellular complexity of a microbial mat, much as we still observe today. Once the atmosphere started to become less hostile, new seed species of plants were put in place and allowed a period to do their work. As for the variety, well, that is not at all hard to picture being done with a relatively small set of controls at the genomic level.

Point being, stop looking for a LUCA for all life, and focus one multiple LUCA for 'kinds' of life.

David: Thanks for your discussion. Yes, in my view of stepwise evolution I assume original parts were readapted and used again stepwise. Also see this entry here:

Wednesday, March 15, 2017, 00:49

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23331172-900-oldest-plantlike-fossils-discovered...

The earliest true plant fossils.

I do get tired of the binary arguments. God can create, and create intelligently so as to not have to micro-manage everything, but he also must respect the boundries of the rule-sets that the foundation of physical reality is built upon (i.e. physics/chemistry), as well as the rule-sets put in place to govern biology. Using this as a stepping stone, we can analyze the system as a whole, from the universe to the solar system to the planet to life and see how all the timing events had to be just so, and then seek to understand WHY they had to be just so. What would happen if they weren't? What does that tell us?

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.