Introducing the brain;complexity: autopilot (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 14, 2018, 10:53 (1953 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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’s bold)

DAVID: You have stepped around the key point, Why not survive the easy way? Of course species are killed off by adverse events they didn't ask for. Raup covered that in his book about extinctions. As for jumping into the water to find food, what is wrong with migrating on land to where the supply is better and massive phenotypic and physiological changes are not required to be designed?? The choice is not unilateral at any time as you imply. The bold above shows how you give short shrift to whale modifications. I brought them up because it is the most extreme example of speciation I know of, more so than humans in a physiological sense, and you usually brush it off as less than that.

Nobody knows how speciation happened, extreme or not so extreme, and what you have bolded is hardly “brushing off”. The key point is that pre-whales did not and probably could not survive the “easy way”. They did go into the water, and their bodies changed accordingly. But you want us to believe that there was no need for them to change their environment, and your God simply changed their legs to fins and told them to enter the water because he wanted them to be more complex (see below) – I don’t know why fins should be regarded as more complex than legs – and to provide food – I don’t know why pre-whales couldn’t just go on providing food – to keep life going until he could fulfil his one and only purpose.

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

dhw: 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.”

DAVID: The road from single cells to humans is one of constant increasing complexity, a point you cannot deny.

Of course it is. So is the road from single cells to whales and elephants and the duckbilled platypus. But if he designed all these “necessary changes for survival”, how can you say that survival played little or no role in evolution?

DAVID: And note humans survive better than any other animal on earth with the modifications as they came out of the trees. God did not have the circular reasoning you have invented for Him. Totally irrational.

So although these modifications enabled humans to survive better than any other animal on earth, they apparently had nothing to do with survival. I’m glad you agree that your argument is totally irrational.