Natures wonders: walking fish have not evolved (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 22, 2020, 14:45 (1765 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Why try to attempt a difficult advance if it not entirely necessary? What would force it by being completely necessary or death would occur? 99% of all species are gone. That provides the obvious answer. Most species can't do it and end up by 'bad luck' as Raup pointed out.

Environmental change may have made it necessary for survival, or may have offered new opportunities to improve chances of survival. I like Raup’s interpretation, and if we follow the theory of cellular intelligence, what we have is that some cell communities are capable of adapting, some are even capable of innovating, and the rest are unlucky enough not to have the intelligence (though luck may also play a vital role, largely depending on the nature of the environmental change) that would enable them to adapt or innovate. If we follow the Davidian interpretation, those that die are lucky enough to have been preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago to come into existence, but unlucky enough not to have been preprogrammed to survive the new conditions.

DAVID: Yet evolution proceeded to complexify all along at a steady rate with large advances in the gaps. [dhw: hardly “steady”, since you keep harping on about gigantic gaps.] Thus logically most species cannot make the advances by themselves, so self-improvement is a very doubtful theory. Therefore, logically a designer is required to maintain the process of producing very complex advances.

What sort of logic is this? As above, it is perfectly logical to argue that some intelligent cell communities will find ways of surviving or improving and others won't be so intelligent (or lucky). And personally I find it more likely that the mechanism for intelligence was implanted from the beginning rather than individual programmes for every single innovation, life form, natural wonder, econiche, strategy, extinction etc. in the history of life.