Introducing the brain;complexity: autopilot (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, December 13, 2018, 09:48 (2172 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Survivability is pure Darwinism. The capabilities of early hominins were well beyond the need for survival as compared to the apes they left behind who did not need any changes to survive for the last eight million years of side by side development.

dhw: “Pure Darwinism” does not mean it is wrong! I have answered the point about apes in the paragraph you have quoted. Now please tell me: do you think the invention of clothes, tools, weapons had nothing to do with survival? And please tell me if you think that whale fins replacing legs, baleens replacing teeth, fish camouflaging themselves, butterflies migrating to warmer climates, spiders spinning webs etc. had nothing to do with improving their chances of survival.

DAVID: Getting out of the trees or hopping into a watery environment resulted in severe challenges to survivability to the organisms who did it, and required major changes in phenotypical and physiological aspects of each climate jumper. If survival is such an important issue, why not stay put and take the easy road of continued life.

What on earth makes you think that life has always been an easy road for every organism? Every change in the environment is a threat to some, and if they don’t change, they die. Why do you refuse to consider the possibility, for example, that at some time certain pre-whales began to run short of food on land, found that there was plenty of food in the water, and so started to go fishing? Yes, we agree that marine life requires major changes, as does all speciation, and we can only guess at how it happened. But that does not mean the environment has always been an easy road, so survival was never a problem, and therefore – sticking to our beloved whales – God had to extract the teeth of pre-baleen whales before they started suction-feeding (which they didn’t need to do), and then gave them baleens before they started filter-feeding (which they didn’t need to do) – all to provide food until he could specially design H. sapiens.

DAVID: That is why I say there is a drive to complexity from God to advance evolution, and then only He can design the necessary changes for survival. Advanced complexity requires survival designs for the new circumstances. Perfectly logical. Suviveability is secondary to advancing complexity. […]

If only God can design the changes for survival, and advanced complexity requires survival designs – how can you say survival plays little or no role in evolution? As for complexity, I would reverse your guesswork. I see no point whatsoever in complexity for the sake of complexity, and I would suggest that advanced complexity was the result of the quest for survival. But you now seem to have your God saying to himself: “I must make organisms more complex and therefore I must find a means of helping them to survive, which I will do by making them more complex.”