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

by David Turell , Friday, January 25, 2019, 21:46 (2139 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Have you presented any actual evidence?

dhw: What do you want me to do? Should I cut off the whale’s fins and tail, remove the cuttlefish’s camouflage, stop the monarch butterfly from migrating, go round snipping out the web-making equipment of 50,000 types of spider, and then report back to tell you how long they survive? You claim that your God specially designed all these innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders, and did so to enable the organisms to SURVIVE until his mysteriously self-imposed waiting time of 3.5+ billion years had elapsed, and only then could he design the only thing he wanted to design. "Have you presented any actual evidence?" If the purpose of an innovation, lifestyle or natural wonder (whether specially designed by your God or not) is to help the organism to survive, it is patently absurd to say that survival plays no role in evolution.

Twisting and turning again. I never said it played NO role in evolution. To repeat: species must be designed to survive or evolutionary advances will stop. The driving force is a designer who is fully aware of the necessity of survival. I do not accept survival as a driving force, and I don't expect you to become a research scientist. Just find me a factual report that proves evolution is driven by survival. It is a Darwin concept, never proven, and I know you know that.

DAVID: My view of God's control is obviously a form of common descent, one you don't like, but that doesn't change its validity as a viewpoint.

dhw: Your view changes from day to day. How can you reconcile common descent with “I think God creates species de novo in an evolving order” (January 16)? If he modifies existing species (= common descent), then speciation is not de novo!

DAVID: My view is quite fixed. You misinterpret my use of de novo. Each species is a new species although it certainly may be a modification. It may have come from a previous form but it still is something new. I use it is the Latin sense of something new from something in the past.

dhw: A lot of your views are indeed fixed. Lots of species are now old, and so I presume you mean that each new species is a new species, which I suspect we would all agree on. But if you create something de novo, it means you create it from scratch, not that you modify something that already exists. Creationists believe that their God created each species separately, or de novo (= anew, afresh, from the beginning), whereas evolutionists believe that all species evolved out of earlier species. You are as aware of this as I am. Even with my limited knowledge of Latin, I don’t know how “de novo” can mean “from something in the past”.

No need to argue about de novo. In Latin it is something new. Dictionaries support there usage: Roget's thesaurus : anew, afresh