Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, November 26, 2018, 12:56 (2188 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

QUOTES: "Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time?
"Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.
"But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population "bottleneck" is only a partial explanation at best.
***
"The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said Stoeckle.
"'It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently."
"In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.”

Tantalising! We would need to know precisely when and where the old species gave way to the new, and precisely what were the conditions at the time. We are going back tens and hundreds of millions of years, so just how precise is our knowledge?

David’s comment: The 'inbetween' is the gaps we see in the fossil record. This might explain, in a way, how the gaps occur, but not the underlying cause. God in action? These findings offer no support for 'natural' chance evolution, with no 'inbetween' found.

TONY: Or is it possible that there were epochs, periods, one might even say 'days', of creative activity, followed by a period of settling as the environmental changes they were created to implement came about. Could it be possible that animals were created 'according to their kinds', with all that 'in-between' space explicitly defining their genetic possibility space programmatically exactly as I have hypothesized? And, if so, what's wrong with that?

I also find it logical that changing environmental conditions could be a determining factor in old species dying out and new species emerging. In the light of the above, I would like to ask David why he thinks his God kept changing the environment, killing off one lot of species and designing another lot, if he was always in full control but all he really wanted was to produce H. sapiens. I would like to ask Tony the same question without what follows my “if”.

TONY: The last question is this. On what grounds do we claim to know more than our ancestors, those wonderful minds that formulated the ancient writings that have endured for thousands of years? What do we think we have, and know, that they didn't, and by what objective measure do we make that claim?

Firstly, what do we know about what? If you are talking about the origin of the universe, of life, of speciation, “thousands of years” does not mean your writers had a greater understanding than we do of events that happened millions and billions of years ago. In geological time, they were almost as far away as we are from the beginning of life and the bulk of life’s history. And so your question can be posed both ways. (Or do you reject the possibility that subsequent humans may also have had "wonderful" minds?) Secondly, who are “we”? There are some humans who believe in God, and believe in separate creation, as described in the Bible. There are others who believe in God and believe he created a process of evolution. There are others who believe in evolution, but also believe that it happened without God. And there is no reason to assume that their hypothetical accounts are any more or any less valid than the accounts written thousands of years ago by other humans. Thirdly, and most importantly of all, there are no objective measures to support any claims, theistic or atheistic. The only objective measure would be if there was a God and he revealed himself to us all. So either you take a leap of faith and believe in one of the subjective interpretations, or you remain without a belief.