David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, November 10, 2019, 13:28 (1838 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You still fail to see adaptation is not speciation. Gould's gaps are real.

dhw: I keep repeating that nobody knows how speciation comes about, but adaptation gives us a clue as to a possible and perfectly logical explanation, as illustrated by the whale. The gaps become less of a problem if you accept the idea that intelligent cells (as opposed to random mutations) are responsible for designing responses to changing conditions. We know that in some (though not all) cases, adaptation has to be swift to ensure survival.

DAVID: Whale gaps are huge, and swift adaptations are still not speciation. You are grasping at straws.

You keep ignoring the point that adaptation, whether fast or slow (whale adaptations/innovations were in slow stages) illustrates the fact that organisms change by RESPONDING to changing conditions, not in advance of them, and my proposal is that the same mechanism may be responsible for major changes as well as minor. I regard this as a more solid straw than your millions of 3.8-billion-year-old, divine computer programmes for speciation, plus lifestyles, strategies and natural wonders.

dhw: Of course if he exists he does what he wants to, and I cannot possibly forget that you have no idea why he would have chosen to delay “evolving” H. sapiens, his sole purpose, for 3.X billion years, and that [..] he therefore had to design every non-human life form, lifestyle etc. in order to cover the time he had decided to take.

DAVID: The bold is the only logical part of your statement. The rest wants a humanized God.

dhw: The rest is a summary of your theory, which you tell us is not illogical “if one does not apply human reasoning to the actual history”, and your flaccid “humanizing” complaint is countered by your own agreement that your God “very well could think like us”.

DAVID: But we do not know if God thinks like you do. All supposition. History presents the facts.

Not supposition, but one of several possibilities, all of which are humanly logical, whereas your own fixed belief, in your words, is only logical “if we do not apply human logic to the facts of history”!

DAVID: Hybridization is an accepted form of evolution.
dhw: Of course it is. Only you happened to create a pretty silly form of it: apes with human legs mated with ape-legged apes to produce early hominins! I’d have thought apes with human legs were the hominin ancestors, whereas apes with ape legs would not contribute anything new at all to the human lineage.

DAVID: Silly. Remember something has to be the in between model!

Of course it does. So how can the offspring of human-legged apes and ordinary apes provide anything more “in between” than apes with human legs?

DAVID: Who or what designed the new forms or parts? A designing mind is required.

dhw: […] you should have understood by now that in my hypothesis the new body abilities and forms are designed by the cell communities, and I accept the possibility that the ability to do this designing may have been given to them by your God – but for reasons I cannot fathom, you refuse to accept the possibility that your God might have designed the mechanism to give them this ability.

DAVID: I've accepted it in the past as an inventive mechanism from God with guidelines. You don't like guidelines as it gives your version of God too much control. Your agnosticism is showing up as usual.

Your guidelines are either 3.8-billion-year-old programmes or private lessons in how to do whatever is to be done. My proposal (theistic version) is that your God gave cells the autonomous ability to do their own designing. Nothing whatsoever to do with my agnosticism, but everything to do with a logical explanation for the great higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution, which suggests anything but the single purpose and method you impose on your God, which you admit requires jettisoning all human reasoning.