Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 06, 2018, 12:49 (2178 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You want me to fill in guesses about God's motives. I try to be polite. I don't know them, and since I am satisfied with what He created I'm not inclined to go further. Why you want to probe into something we cannot answer is beyond my understanding.

dhw: We have spent ten years together probing into questions we cannot answer. However, you have been quite specific about your God’s motives and methods, although nobody can possibly know them: he created life in order to produce us so that we would think about him and have a relationship with him, and his method was the special design of every life form and econiche extant and extant in the history of evolution, but you don’t know why he chose this method. I have attempted to bridge this logical gap between your two hypotheses.

DAVID: I see no logical gap. I have no way of knowing why He chose stepwise evolution instead of direct creation a'la the Bible.

You can’t find a logical link between your two hypotheses, but you see no gap. I’d hate to be your passenger when you try to drive your car across a river without a bridge.

Dhw: […] you don’t know why he chose this method to fulfil his sole purpose of designing us, but you don’t want to consider any hypothesis that attempts to fill the gap in your reasoning. Perhaps we should leave it at that, as I have obviously offended you, which is the last thing I would want to do. However, what you cannot expect me to do is leave unchallenged any further statements you make in defence of your hypotheses or in opposition to my own. Below are two such comments:

DAVID: You have not offended me. You are entering an area of supposition which I do not think is worth pursuing since no reasonable conclusions are possible.

Thank you. Unfortunately you have reached two conclusions, and they are so contradictory that you cannot explain them. And yet you regard them as reasonable. I offered you four reasonable conclusions (repeated in yesterday’s post), you have yet to query the logic of any of them, but you prefer to ignore them.

DAVID (under ”Hominins later in Arabia”): Disappearance of a hominin type is not like turning off a light bulb. They die off slowly. That H. sapiens and H. erectus lived side by side suggests sapiens appeared with no intermediate forms. H. sapiens by direct creation is possible.

dhw: Yet again this raises the question of why, if you think your God was capable of direct creation of H. sapiens - his one and only purpose - he chose to specially create the whale, the 50,000 webs, the weaverbird’s nest etc. to keep life going until he could specially create us. And why all the other contemporary forms of human? You have said you don’t know, which in my view should at least leave you open to the possibility that one or other of your hypotheses is wrong.

DAVID: I see my hypotheses are tying together, right or wrong. Life cannot evolve unless it eats all along the way. God creates what He needs to create.

You admit that you can’t find a way of tying your hypotheses together, yes all life depends on food, and if your God exists, I suggest he creates what he wants to create. Why “needs” to create?

DAVID (article on beavers): An ecological article much too long to summarize. It shows how life influences the ecology and the necessary econiches, while changing the local Earth. It answers dhw's attempt to downplay econiches.

dhw: Thank you for this interesting article, and for editing it. No thanks for the comment at the end. I have never disagreed that econiches are changing all the time, all life forms provide necessary food for other life forms, life cannot continue without energy etc. etc. The one disagreement I have with you is your fixed idea that all life forms and econiches are/were specially and individually preprogrammed/dabbled by your God, and are/were all “stepping stones” to keep life going for the sole purpose of producing humans.

DAVID: Well, that is clear and logical as a disagreement. You are still with Darwin, and I am not.

Nothing to do with Darwin, and I wish you would stick to the point and stop relying on the word “Darwin” to distract attention from the arguments! See the “Neanderthal thread”.