Innovation and Speciation: earliest fully a whale (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, May 27, 2019, 16:22 (2006 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTE: “With this new fossil find, however, dating to 49 million years ago (bear in mind that Pakicetus lived around 53 million years ago), this means that the first fully aquatic whales now date to around the time when walking whales (Ambulocetus) first appear. This substantially reduces the window of time in which the Darwinian mechanism has to accomplish truly radical engineering innovations and genetic rewiring to perhaps just five million years — or perhaps even less. It also suggests that this fully aquatic whale existed before its previously-thought-to-be semi-aquatic archaeocetid ancestors."

DAVID: Another recitation of the complex changes that were required for land mammals to become fully aquatic. Not by chance.

dhw: As usual, the critics and you fasten onto the chance theme, and totally ignore the possibility that all these complex changes were the result not of chance but of intelligent cooperation between the cellular communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. Nobody has the slightest idea how long it would take intelligent organisms to work out these complexities, so the whole argument simply falls apart if we accept what even you regard as a 50/50 possibility that cells/cell communities are intelligent.

My comment about cell intelligence relates only to the momentary activities of individual cells as they respond to stimuli or manufacture necessary proteins. It does not apply to your fantasy that cells can invent new complex forms of whole animals.