David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, November 11, 2019, 17:23 (1837 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Whale adaptations were huge. You cannot downsize them. Look at the series of major changes to refresh your memory. Gould's concept of gaps cannot be ignored. He was a semi-honest Darwinist, shown by the invention of punc-inc, never proven.

dhw: Thank you for calling them adaptations. Yes, they are huge, which is why they led to new species. And this is why I keep telling you that it is difficult to draw a borderline between adaptation and innovation, but since we know that minor adaptations occur as responses to new conditions, it is not unreasonable to suppose that major adaptations will follow the same process (as opposed to your God changing legs into flippers before the pre-whale enters the water).

The difference is obvious. Species have adaptations and stay the same species. New species imply much larger changes in form and function, requiring design.

dhw: Yet again: nobody knows how speciation occurs, and your theory remains just as unproven as any other, so why do you keep trotting that out instead of considering how reasonable each theory might be. Your own unproven theory demands that we jettison humans reasoning altogether!

Not so. My theories are the result of reasoning from many facts and points of view.

DAVID: History supplies the facts, which can be logically analyzed. You and I differ, since I say that the history is the result of God's actions.

dhw: If God exists, I have no doubt that the history (= the higgledy-piggledy bush of life forms) is the result of his actions.

DAVID: You agree that can be true if God is in charge and then you deny it….

dhw: I deny that the higgledy-piggledy bush is the result of his sole purpose being to design H. sapiens, his inexplicable decision (you have "no idea" why he made it) to wait 3.X billion years before fulfilling his sole purpose, and the resultant necessity to design every preceding non-human life form etc, to cover the time he had decided to take – a theory which by your own admission is only logical if “we do not apply human reasoning to the facts of history” - your very own words.

Usual distortion. The bush provides food supply for the time it took. God produced the history.

dhw: 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 illogical combination of single purpose and method you impose on your God.

DAVID: Your usual mantra. The bush is required to supply energy for life to evolve over 3.8 billion years as history shows. Have you forgotten everyone has to eat regularly? No you haven't. You choose to ignore it. God in charge got to his purpose by creating the evolution of life over the time history says it took. Again you humanize God whom you think shouldn't have been so patient. Real history is not illogical.

dhw: Yes, yes, all life forms require food, and history says it took 3.X billion years for humans to appear, and you know perfectly well that this is not the issue, which yet again I have summarized above in bold (see "I deny…”). You agree that your God “very well could think like us”, and that your theory is illogical by human standards, and of course history (the higgledy-piggledy bush of life) is not illogical – it is your interpretation of it that is illogical by your own (human) admission.

Distortion as usual. My theory is logical using a logical human brain. I don't humanly analyze God's reasons for His actions. I simply accept the actions. You constantly wonder why He did what He did. That simply leads to your confusion about God.