Evolution: early mammals (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, October 27, 2019, 17:06 (1854 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I agree with you that it all “reeks of design”, but it also reeks of experimentation . The one thing it doesn’t reek of is a designer who has just one goal in mind (H. sapiens), is in full control and knows exactly how to fulfil that goal. If he exists, your God may have been enjoying his own creativity, like a painter enjoying his paintings (your image), or he may have had a goal in mind and didn’t know how to reach it (hence all the experiments), or of course he may have given organisms (which consist of cell communities) the intelligence to conduct their own experiments. That is also design. What does emerge from all these discoveries is that transitional forms exist, and are clear evidence for the theory of common descent. I think Darwin would have cried “Yeehah!” or words to that effect.

DAVID: What this tells me is that the rate of evolution is not a steady progression, as shown especially by the Cambrian, but also by this discovery. Of course there will be transitional forms. A steady rate of chance mutations will not do this.

dhw: I note that you have ignored the whole of my comment. We have long since agreed to discount chance mutations.

DAVID: It was your usual restated comment. 'Reeking of experimentation' by whom? God didn't need to and cell committees don't have the ability, based on known biology. Looks very purposeful to me.

dhw: Of course it’s all purposeful. Every single new life form has the purpose of increasing its chances of survival by adapting to or exploiting its environment. “God didn’t need to” reflects your fixed belief that you know God’s nature and his thinking. It is perfectly possible that he enjoyed experimenting with different life forms (this would fit in with your fixed belief that he personally designed every life form, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution), or alternatively that he had one particular goal in mind (to design a creature that could think like himself) but didn’t know how to do it (experimentation). “Cell committees don’t have the ability” (I call them “communities” to avoid your ironic humanization) refers to a theory which, I agree, is unproven - as are the theories that there is a God, and that this God’s only purpose was to design humans, and that this God decided not to fulfil his purpose for 3.X billion years and therefore “had to” design everything else in order to “cover” the time he had decided to take before doing what he wanted to do.

Your theories about God are all reasonable if you assume God didn't really know what He was doing or what purposes He had in mind when He created the universe. The God you describe in these theories is simply a human version of non-God-like humanized God. Every attribute is what an exploring experimenting human might do. As for your cellular theory, which has to have the ability for creating new complex biochemicals and their complex biochemical reactions with a useful product, it can only be the result of complex instructions. Read James Tour and recognize the extreme difficulty of creating something new in organic chemistry, a job cells do easily all the time. A designer is required.