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

by David Turell , Saturday, March 23, 2019, 14:22 (2072 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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 [you] have no idea, so maybe something is wrong with your hypothesis. See “Big brain evolution”.

Gross distortion of my thoughts. God chose to evolve humans over time. The only thing I do not know is His thought process in making that choice. You have agreed He has the right to choose, and I've agreed He might have limits as a reason. Nothing wrong with my hypothesis under those circumstances.

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.

dhw: 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.

Not relevant. My main point still persists: bacteria were purposely preserved to play a role now, innately intelligent or not.