New Oxygen research; abundance and Cambrian (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 08, 2019, 18:20 (2026 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: It is the underlying mechanism of your comment that is at issue. I view it as much more active than your passive approach of changing environment pushing the animals to change.

dhw: This is not a passive process! It is the very opposite! Environmental change either demands or allows new actions. Survival depends on active change (= adaptation), and innovation depends on inventiveness, which is even more active. The changed environment is the trigger for action – passivity in most cases will result in extinction. According to you, however, organisms do absolutely nothing apart from magically turning on the one special programme passed down by the very first cells for every single change or, alternatively, lying/sitting there while your God performs his operations or delivers his lectures on how-to-do-it.

Yes, this is a discussion about how speciation works. The minor adaptations we see have never been proven to do any more than that. The fossil record only shows large gaps which reinforces the problem about adaptations leading to anything. The changes we do see in any species series requires design and planning, as I view it.

DAVID: The hippopotamus makes a major point:
The Hippo is a creature that has been around for a very long time. There is evidence to suggest they walked on the Earth more than 55 million years ago. The closest relatives of the Hippo are whales and porpoises. There are fossils that have been located in Africa that are dated back about 16 million years ago. They have been analyzed on many levels to give us some insight about Hippo evolution.
https://www.hippoworlds.com/hippopotamus-evolution/

And they still have four legs despite all that time in water, It is obviously something besides environment that guides development of new forms and major modifications.

dhw: There is no need to tell us that every species is different, and of course there is “something” which develops the new forms to cope with or exploit the new environment. I propose cellular intelligence, and you propose ye ancient computer programme or dabbling. Once an organism has found a means of survival that enables it to cope with its environment, there is no need for it to change. Hence bacteria from the year dot. Some organisms remain the same (hippo), whereas others may find means of improving their chances of survival by producing new structures for themselves (whales). In your own mish-mush of hypotheses, you simply have your God organizing the same process – his programmes and dabbles result in different ways of coping with or exploiting the environment (or of course not coping, and going extinct), but you have the anatomical changes taking place before the environmental changes.

In this arena of land animals going aquatic, those that choose to do so must solve major physiologic problems. Tell me how whales learned to give birth and nurse under water. Trial and error won't work. In view of that one point, to me your theory of speciation is impossible.