Evolution: whale adaptive losses and changes (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, September 29, 2019, 19:43 (1880 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Interesting complex changes, and one can imagine some of these adaptations while learning to become aquatic, but note my bold. How does a whale learn to sleep with half a brain active while living in the water, without drowning during the process of adaptation? For me God prepared them.

dhw: Nobody knows, but I suggest that, as with every other adaptation, the cells worked out a solution to improve performance or to cope with new conditions. It’s not beyond the scope of reason that initially some whales did drown if they strayed too far away from land, and others swam till they found dry land to sleep on. Loss of melatonin would then be the result of training the body to do without sleep for long periods. But the eventual half and half compromise would be the solution that worked best and hence survived by natural selection. Certainly no more fanciful than your God preprogramming the first cells with the whole history of whale stages, bacteria solutions, monarch butterfly migration, weaverbird nesting etc., all to cover the time he’d decided to wait before pursuing his one and only goal!

DAVID: Your explanation tells us some just-so stories. Finding dry land does not explain what God must have programmed.

dhw: That is your “just-so story”, and I don’t know where you get your “must have” from! In any case, why is it “just-so” that initially some whales would have drowned but others could have found a place to sleep?

DAVID:The point is not finding a place to sleep! It is how do you learn to sleep while in a total water environment? The result is half a brain asleep, no melatonin, and still take a breath now and then. For me it is designed from the beginning. logically, it cannot be learned as a gradual adaptation.

dhw: One moment you have your God taking 2O million years to develop sapiens’ vertebrae because it had to be done step by step, and the next you have him either coming down from heaven and literally overnight changing every sleepy pre-whale into a half-sleepy whale, or he provided the first cells with a programme to accomplish the same operation. And this was done because he had to cover the time he had decided to take before designing H. sapiens bit by bit. No wonder you have come up with the following conclusion:

DAVID: You try to make God logical to fit your human thinking, It doesn't work.

dhw: Correction: you try to make God illogical to fit your fixed belief in his purpose and method of achieving that purpose. So be it, but please don’t tell us that your theory is logical because it fits in with God’s illogicality!

God is not illogical. As the Creator, He does what He wants, making big or small steps, and we see the results in the history, which we then can try to interpret.