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

by dhw, Tuesday, January 22, 2019, 11:21 (2130 days ago) @ David Turell

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

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

And

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

I would have thought that for most people the role of survival as a driving force is blindingly obvious, and even you keep agreeing that the purpose of cooperation between organisms, the development of fins, camouflage and migration– whether designed by your God or designed by the cell communities themselves – is to ensure survival! If you wish to add to this your personal and inexplicable belief that your God’s reason for wanting the whale to survive in water, the cuttlefish to survive predation, and the monarch butterfly to survive the winter, was that if they hadn‘t, he couldn’t have waited 3.5+ billion years in order to specially design you and me, that’s up to you. But it does not alter the fact that the purpose of the fin, the camouflage and the migration was to improve chances of survival, and for most of us the purpose of something is the driving force behind its coming into being.

The next section of your post deals with the same conflation of the blindingly obvious purpose of survival, which you keep acknowledging, with the overall purpose you impose on your God of filling in 3.5+ billion years of life before he specially designs the only thing he actually wants to design.

DAVID: I only hate what his [Darwin’s] followers have created in a religion of Darwinism to protect his out-of-date ideas.

dhw: I agree that some of Darwin’s ideas are out of date (as above), but some are not.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.

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

Sometimes you say you accept evolution, but sometimes you insist that every innovation was specially designed and you subscribe directly to Creationism: “I think God creates species de novo in an evolving order.” I don’t know what you meant by an evolving order, but de novo could hardly be clearer. I accept common descent, the influence of the environment on speciation, survival as the driving force (which entails cooperation as well as competition), and natural selection as a neat term to explain the survival of organs and organisms (but NOT to explain speciation). I am only against random mutations as the cause of innovations, and Darwin’s insistence that “natura non facit saltus”.