Evolution and humans: Neanderthal lungs larger (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 07, 2018, 20:24 (2206 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Balance of nature is not useful for itself, which I view as a strange off the point comment. Any presently existing balance of nature supplies energy for on -going evolution which takes time to create new forms.

dhw: The ever changing spectacle is an ever changing balance, it is not “useful for” balance. All you are telling us is that life requires energy, and evolution has gone on for a long time. That does not explain why your God specially designed 50,000 webs and Neanderthal lungs when his purpose was to produce the brain and body of H. sapiens.

Ignored as usual my point: balance supplies the necessary energy for life to take time to evolve. Having a spectacle is a good human view of evolution. You don't know it was God's intent to view spectacles. He needed to feed life as it evolved and diverse forms do just that.

DAVID: All I have said is God may have tried out different approaches on his way to Humans. I have no idea how rigidly He followed a direct plan or a more fluid one.

dhw: If he tried out different approaches, either he didn’t know what he wanted, or he knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to get it. I don’t know how a direct plan would result in billions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct, including 50,000 spider webs and Neanderthal lungs, and I really don’t see how they would result even from a fluid plan to produce H. sapiens. Perhaps it would be best if you followed the principle you keep trying to impose on me, and abandoned all your attempts to read your God’s mind, which would save you the trouble of saddling him with a purpose which you can only link to life’s history by claiming that your God’s logic is different from ours.

I only try to interpret God's mind because you are constantly doing it at your human level of thought. Of course there was no direct plan. God obviously used 3.5+ billion of years of evolution to get to this point. The issue, no matter how much you twist and misinterpret it, is diversity of living forms produces balances of nature that produce the energy for evolution to take so much time.