Big brain evolution: our special gene is identified (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 17, 2019, 20:05 (2135 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Now please tell me which half of the process is autonomous.

DAVID: The major gaps before the sudden appearances in the fossil record tell us stepwise small adaptations aren't the way it happens.

dhw: Under “Little Foot” you wrote “God used an evolutionary method requiring little steps and big jumps/gaps as history of evolution teaches us.” The point I have raised above is the difficulty of setting a borderline between adaptation (little steps) and innovation (big steps).

Explained in that thread.

DAVID: Think Gould and punc. inc. and Darwin's own prediction that the steps have to be found to validate him. They haven't more than 150 years later. You are still almost totally Darwinist in your thinking. Directed design is the best fit to the problem. Survival in never pushing it.

dhw: I have repeatedly told you that I accept punctuated equilibrium, and I have repeatedly pointed out that NOBODY has yet explained the major innovations required for speciation. I don’t know how often you want me to repeat all the alternative explanations I have offered, or to repeat that NONE of them answer all our questions. And I don’t know how you can possibly stick to your dogma that survival “never pushes evolution”, when even your own unproven hypothesis claims that your God deliberately designed one innovation after another to enable organisms to survive under new conditions, and their purpose was to enable life forms to survive until he could produce the only life form he actually wanted to produce, which was you and me. The difference between us here is that you have the innovations/adaptations being designed (by your God) in anticipation of their being needed for survival under new conditions, whereas I have them being designed (by intelligent cell communities) in response to their being needed for survival under new conditions. In both cases, survival is the prime reason for each innovation.

And that response to natural demands for survival is pure Darwin.