Genome complexity: what genes do and don't do (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 23, 2019, 10:56 (2072 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: By “itty bitty” I mean one bit at a time […] why did he take millions of years fiddling with the big toe, the pelvis, different sizes of brain, different types of hominin, different types of human? [...]

DAVID: Your definition has no basis in fact. Compare Lucy, habilis, and erectus with sapiens. […]

dhw: I have done exactly that. If your God’s one purpose was to design H. sapiens, it would seem that he did the designing one bit at a time, as described above, which is what I mean by “itty bitty”.

DAVID: That is not my definition. Itty-bitty is Darwin's tiny adaptations until something big happens. Our hominin gaps are huge.

Ah well, since according to you these huge gaps can only be bridged by your God’s special design, let’s drop the expression “itty bitty” and simply ask ourselves why your God, whose sole purpose was apparently to specially design H. sapiens, spent millions of years specially designing bit by bit of him: big toes, then pelvises, then different sized brains, then different types of hominin, then different types of human. You admit that have no idea, so maybe something is wrong with your hypothesis. See “Big brain evolution”.

dhw: […] you tried somehow to use the non-evolution of bacteria as evidence that they were not intelligent.

DAVID: We don't know if bacteria are intelligent. It is a 50/50 possibility from our observations.

Agreed, but the non-evolution of some bacteria is irrelevant to the question of whether they are or are not intelligent.

DAVID: You haven’t answered the major point, which is bacteria were preserved, and therefore they did not evolve into multicellularity by any mechanism they might have had. As God speciated, they purposely were kept for future functions and God produced something entirely new while using some of what bacteria had: DNA.

dhw: I have now answered it twice, but I’ll try again. Evolution does not mean that EVERY existing organism turns into another organism. SOME bacteria would have joined forces to create multicellularity, and others would have remained the same. SOME ape ancestors would have turned into pre-humans, but others would have remained the same. As bacteria have always been able to survive changes to their environment, they did not need to “evolve” into anything but bacteria. But SOME of them decided (“intelligence” theory) or were divinely preprogrammed/dabbled (your theory), or simply happened (chance theory) to form ever evolving communities.

DAVID: You are right in that 99% of species die out. And since we do not know how things speciate, you have listed possibilities.

Yes indeed. More to the point, as above, is that the non-evolution of some bacteria is irrelevant to the question of whether they are intelligent or not.