Evolution: earliest mammals (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 13:05 (1614 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: "Much of the constellation of features we think of as defining mammals — complex teeth, excellent senses, lactation, small litter size — might actually have evolved before true mammals, and quite quickly. “More and more it looks like it all came out in a very short burst of evolutionary experimentation,” Luo says. By the time mammal-like creatures were roaming around in the Mesozoic, he says, “the lineage has already acquired its modern look and modern biological adaptations”."

DAVID: the same problems that surround the evolution of live birth, the accommodation of skull and pelvic size while a brain is enlarging as evolution goes forward, apply to suckling milk with special arrangements in the infant throat involving the special hyoid bone shape and function to allow suckling without drowning. The problem is designing at the same time changes in two separate individuals, mother and infants. Only design by a designer can accomplish this contemporaneous set of alterations. Darwin theory cannot answer this problem.

dhw: Thank you for another thought-provoking article. I agree with you that Darwin theory cannot answer the problem. We do not have any theory that can answer the problem. We only have speculative hypotheses. “Evolutionary experimentation” is an interesting phrase which would fit in equally with the concept of an experimenting God (as opposed to an always-in-charge God with a single purpose and the knowledge of how to achieve that purpose), or of cell communities finding different ways to enhance their chances of survival.

DAVID: Your answer neatly avoids the issue of an obvious need for a designer.

Your comment neatly avoids my proposal that the article could be used to support the theory of an experimenting designer as opposed to a designer with a single purpose and the knowledge to achieve that purpose. It also neatly avoids the proposal that all the changes might be designed through the (possibly God-given) intelligence of the cell communities of which all organisms are composed.