Human evolution; "Little foot's" balance mechanism (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 21, 2019, 15:33 (2131 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID:Glib response. Just accept the obvious. From simple to complex in evolution can be created in stepwise fashion.

dhw: Of course it can! How does that support your contention that your God did not design the whale’s fin in order to help the whale survive in water, but in order to enable him to design the human ear, pelvis etc.? This raises the next question, which you keep refusing to answer:

dhw: Why do you think organisms cooperate if it’s not in order to improve their chances of survival?

Survival is required for evolution to continue. Survival is designed into the process by God.

DAVID: I accept Margulis. I always have. Of course there is cooperation. Note my presentation of lichens. Lichens have a purpose in that they break down lava rock on the way to soil for plants. Everything in evolution fills God purposes to eventually create humans. And He must design for survival if his method is to continue.

dhw: So the purpose of organisms cooperating or of your God specially designing dinosaurs to eat one another, and turning pre-whale legs into fins, and teaching monarch butterflies the route to safety, and camouflaging cuttlefish, and specially designing 50,000 different spider webs had nothing to do with helping those organisms to survive, but it was to help those organisms to survive! Because if those evolutionary developments hadn’t been specially designed to help those organisms to survive, your always-in-control God couldn’t have stuck to his self-imposed timetable of specially designing H. sapiens after 3.5+ billion years.

Welcome to the clear history of evolution. Survival is obviously required for evolution to continue. "Struggle for survival" does not drive evolution.

DAVID: I don't hate Darwin. He opened up an area for research and discussion by making us all recognize we got here by evolution. His antiquated arguments were reasonable enough at his time in life, but they need to be fully abandoned as we learn what he theorized as causing evolution is totally wrong.

Abandoning ideas such as random mutations as the cause of innovation, and nature never jumps, is in my view very reasonable. That is not the same as “fully” abandoning his ideas. I’m actually surprised to hear that you still recognize that we got here by evolution, when in a recent post you believed that your God “creates species de novo”, but perhaps this is no more surprising than your insistence that survival is not a driving force for evolution even though you think your God specially designed innovations in order to help the organisms survive (as above), or your reluctance to answer questions such as: why do you think organisms cooperate if it’s not in order to improve their chances of survival?

Cooperation helps survival, but you keep insisting survival drives evolution and that is a concept that is unproven.

DAVID: I only hate what his followers have created in a religion of Darwinism to protect his out-of-date ideas.

dhw: I agree that some of Darwin’s ideas are out of date (as above), but some are not. I also hate it when both theists and atheists distort Darwin’s ideas and pretend that evolution is incompatible with religious belief when he explicitly pointed out that it wasn’t.

Which of Darwin's ideas do you cling to? Both of us accept that we evolved as he championed. Anything more?