Introducing Gunter Bechly (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 20, 2019, 08:10 (1799 days ago) @ David Turell

https://youtu.be/NmZd4SzVD7M

dhw: Thank you. Well worth listening to, and well worth noting that he tries to dissociate ID from religion. He clearly hasn’t heard of Shapiro’s “natural genetic engineering”, and might perhaps revise his view of the accuracy of calculated “waiting time” if he realized that Darwin style mutations are not the only route to novelty, and ID could be accomplished by the intelligence of the cell communities of which all multicellular organisms consist. There is simply no way of calculating how long intelligent, cognitive, sentient beings might need to design an evolutionary novelty.

DAVID: All ID folks avoid using religion. He may well be aware of Shapiro's theory. Bechly is a paleontologist, not a geneticist, but exploring the mechanics of genetics. I've never seen any article mentioning Shapiro as a support for a presentation that builds on his theory. Bechly would bring his waiting time view to Shapiro's idea. "How long" means it must fit into the timing history gives us. We all admit something has to be a quick process to act within the known time gaps. A mind is the fastest designer we know. That is a real, not a theoretical view.

And Bechly makes no mention of the possibility that even micro-organisms may have minds, and if they do, we can have no idea how long those minds would need to work out new ways of coping with or exploiting their environment.

Under “homo erectus”:
Quote: "These specimens confirm that the species likely went extinct due to climate change, study coauthor Russell Ciochon, a biological anthropologist at the University of Iowa, tells CNN. “The open woodland was replaced by a rainforest. No Homo erectus fossils are found after the environment changed, so Homo erectus likely was unable to adapt to this new rainforest environment,” he says."

DAVID: No time for adaptation is suggested, or the species was incapable of adapting and remained the same for two million years. dhw thinks environmental changes drives speciation. Hmmmmm.

Why hmmmmm? My suggestion is that when the environment changes, some organisms die out, some adapt, and some exploit the new conditions through innovations. How does the extinction of homo erectus through climate change create a hmmmmm?