Natures wonders: walking fish have not evolved (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 31, 2020, 12:51 (1756 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: MY THEORY DOES NOT INVOLVE FORESEEING FUTURE NEEDS. MY THEORY IS THAT ORGANISMS ARE INTELLIGENT AND RESPOND TO NEW CONDITIONS. THEY DO NOT FORESEE THEM. AND SOME ARE CLEVER ENOUGH TO ADAPT, AND SOME ARE CLEVER ENOUGH TO FIND WAYS OF EXPLOITING THE NEW CONDITIONS IN ORDER TO IMPROVE THEIR CHANCES OF SURVIVAL.

DAVID: Thank you for the clarification. Only current challenges can fit your theory. Not the future which has always been my point.

dhw: You’ve grasped it. I do not believe that pre-whales were given flippers before they entered the water, or indeed that any organisms adapt or innovate in anticipation of the future, or that your God preprogrammed every undabbled major adaptation/innovation or bacterial response 3.8 billion years ago in anticipation of every change in the environment for the rest of life’s history. Crystal-ball gazing has always been your point.

DAVID: And your approach does not satisfy the reasoning about a 1,200 cc brain which arrived 300,000 years before it was more completely used. Why was it there and unused for so long and which new conditions required it to evolve to that size and complexity at that time?

What do you mean by “more completely”? Do you think our ancestors wandered around like zombies, not using their brains? Or do you think they should have invented the computer the moment the brain expanded? We’ve been over all this before. My proposal is that the pre-human brain increased in size in response to new demands on it, as our ancestors devised more and more complex methods of survival. But there were limits to how far it could expand, and so complexification eventually took over from expansion (actually resulting in shrinkage). You ask which new conditions? Why do you expect me to answer a question that nobody else has answered? We can only speculate according to what we know currently, which is that new demands change the brain. Nobody has ever witnessed a brain changing in anticipation of new demands made on it.

The same argument applies to adaptations and innovations. So please tell us what evidence you have that your God gave pre-whales flippers before they entered the water, and whether you think the programmes with which you believe he equipped the first living cells for every single undabbled innovation, lifestyle etc. were accompanied by programmes for every single environmental change that the innovations were to cope with or exploit, or were these conditions random and he simply had a crystal ball that told him what would happen?