Bacterial Intelligence and Evolution (General)

by David Turell , Monday, May 06, 2019, 20:25 (2026 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: UCSB Science Line
scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2536

QUOTE: "For whales and dolphins, their front legs turned into flippers. Their back legs became really tiny, so tiny that you can't even see them when you look at these animals, but they have hind legs still inside their bodies -- if you see a skeleton of a whale you can see it has tiny leg bones near its tail."

It doesn’t matter two hoots whether you call this adaptation or innovation (which is why I say we cannot draw a borderline between the two) – it is the process by which evolutionary changes occur in response to different environments, and such major changes lead to speciation.

In Alaska I've seen a whale skeleton with the vestigial limbs. I view innovation as major modifications, and see a major demarcation, which to support your view, you want to blur.

DAVID: The difference requires planning as no tiny steps are seen in the gap between leg and flipper. Gaps absolutely require planning in my view and the fossil record is filled with gaps.

dhw: Yes, the fossil record is incomplete. In order to satisfy you, we would need a complete set of thousands of fossils recording every millimetre of front leg into flipper and big back leg into mini back leg. I’m afraid I still find RESPONSE to environmental requirements more likely than your God performing a one-off leg-into-flipper-and-shrink-the-back-leg operation on umpteen pre-whales in advance of sending them into the water to eat and be eaten until he performed all the operations necessary to produce H. sapiens.

Gould was so worried about the gaps he invented punc inc theory, but you are not worried!

DAVID: The difference is I view God as very purposeful, and your fancy allows the organisms to evolve as they wish, under a God you envision as less purposeful.

dhw: Dealt with over and over again. If God’s purpose was to create a free-for-all (with the option of dabbling), then that is purposeful.

I follow experts just as you do. Karen Armstrong viewed the Koran as having the most mature view of God by concentrating on His works which to me means a God of very strong purpose, who k new what He wanted to accomplish and did it directly. You view of God is mamby-pamby, wishy-washy, who struggles to decide what to do, clearly based on your suppositions about Him, which always make Him humanized.

DAVID: I'll stick with my view of God as purposeful, and not wonder about His choice of method.
And later: There are no answers as to why God chose his method of creation. He had the right to chose, as you admit, so why question it? And the methods He chose to control evolution are the only ones that are reasonable to me.

dhw: Nothing to do with purposefulness. You cannot make sense of your hypothesis, which suggests that either your concept of God’s one and only purpose (to design H. sapiens) or of his method of achieving his purpose (designing billions of other life forms to eat or not one another until he designed H. sapiens), or both, may be flawed. Why you should consider an undiscovered 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for all undabbled bacterial behaviour, innovations, life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders more “reasonable” than a (possibly God-given) mechanism for autonomous invention remains a mystery to me.

The whole problem is your view of God as stated above. You agree God, in charge, had the right to choose and then give Him a weak personality, so His choices became less firm decisions.