Evolution and humans: Neanderthal lungs larger (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10:14 (2199 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You do not understand advanced planning by leaving out phenotype changes in speciation.

dhw: Yet again: I propose that speciation takes place IN RESPONSE to new conditions and not before those conditions exist (advanced planning), and it hardly needs to be said that speciation involves phenotype changes!

DAVID: Blithely skipping again that fact that phenotypic changes require huge alterations of body parts, and require design.

dhw: Dealt with over and over again, as under “birth canal”. Of course speciation involves alterations of body parts, small or huge. And design does not have to mean your God preprogramming or personally dabbling every change in advance of the conditions that require or allow change. We go round and round because you keep repeating the same points and ignoring my responses to them.

DAVID: I've not ignored your responses. You understand that changes are required to create new species. You never respond to my point that the gaps in species forms require very large anatomic, and with whales, complex physiological changes that require planning. Somehow, under your ideas, organisms change to fit the new requirements, but you never recognize the obvious need for design and planning. Tiny modifications are minor adaptations to to small alterations, not covering the gaps. My belief is a planning mind is required, therefore I state God does it. you cannot find belief in God so you scramble around, and I find n one of our proposed alternatives credible.

Only an idiot would fail to acknowledge that speciation requires change, and that in many cases those changes are large. Yet again I must repeat that although I recognize the obvious need for design, I do not recognize the need for advance PLANNING, even if your God is the maker of life and evolution. In concrete terms, I find it well nigh impossible to believe that your God fiddled around with the anatomies of pre-whales before they left the land and pre-humans before they left the trees. This also raises the unanswered/unanswerable question of the degree to which you think your God controlled every environmental change. My agnosticism (neither belief nor disbelief in God) has nothing whatsoever to do with this problem. It seems to me perfectly feasible that your God (if he exists) would have created the MECHANISM whereby organisms would RESPOND to changing conditions. We know for a fact that they do this through minor adaptations, as you say, but (yet again let me repeat) since nobody knows how speciation works, my proposal that this mechanism might also produce major changes is a hypothesis, because there is no more evidence for it than there is for your own hypothesis. And you have heard all this before!

dhw: First you accuse me of being illogical by erecting a straw man (you know perfectly well that I do NOT believe in a chance origin of life and consciousness), and then you dodge the issue (yet again) of why your God would personally design every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct if his purpose was to produce the brain and body of H. sapiens. In fairness, however, you did offer “experimentation” as a logical explanation, but when I pointed out that this meant either your God didn’t know what he wanted, or he knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to get it, you dismissed the idea and scurried back to your God’s logic being different from ours. If you refuse to accept a logical explanation, and cannot come up with another logical explanation that you find acceptable, then you can hardly blame me for attacking your logic, or for pointing out that if your God’s logic is different from “ours”, that is an acknowledgement that you can’t find a logical explanation!

DAVID: My logical explanations remain the same. Design is required to cover the gaps in form and physiology. You don't deny evolution is punctuated, but your response is always that somehow organisms change. It is a non-answer faced with the need for design.

Once again, I accept the need for design, but the question is WHAT is designed? Since nobody knows how speciation happens, everybody’s response has to be that “somehow organisms change”. You say your God preprogrammed or dabbled every single change before the necessary conditions even came into being. I suggest that if he exists, he designed the MECHANISM for change, but not every individual change. That is not a non-answer, it is a hypothesis. But all of this sees you yet again dodging the whole issue I have raised above, which I have now bolded just in case you should miss it. And you talk of non-answers!