Biological complexity: how big is the bush of life? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, April 13, 2020, 20:42 (1685 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: My first bold is a notice of my surprise at their surprise. of course their is endless diversity to find in our bush of life.

dhw: Why of course? According to you, your God’s one and only purpose was to produce humans. In that case, why did he need “endless” diversity? Elementary logic suggests that if he had only wanted humans, he would only have needed to provide enough diversity to feed humans. But “of course” endless variety would be the result of his creating a mechanism which gave free rein to organisms to work out their own ways of coping with or exploiting all the different forms of environment.

Quote: "Our planet is deeply interconnected—what happens in the deep sea impacts life on land—and vice versa. This research is vital to advance our understanding of that connection—and the importance of protecting these fragile ecosystems. The Ningaloo Canyons are just one of many vast underwater wonders we are about to discover that can help us better understand our planet." (David's bold)

DAVID: The second bold is right on point: the interconnectedness is vital as I constantly point out about the balance of econiches, and the necessary supply of food for all, no matter how diverse. All of this diversity comes from evolution from bacteria. Its presence in this size advertises its importance. Let us not hear about God enjoying spectacle or whatever humanistic weirdness can be imagined. If it is God's creation, it is highly purposeful for a real reason.

dhw: You already quoted this a couple of days ago, and ignored my response:
"I would not question the article’s statement that our planet is deeply interconnected. It always has been, long before humans arrived. And when connections break, we get new connections and new econiches. That does not mean your God specially designed 3.X billion years’ worth of non-human econiches for the sake of humans who were not even there!"

Your whole series of comments about God's activities resembles a discontent spectator at a sports match. From your unhappy viewpoint, the manager and/or the team captain really have very little idea of what they are planning or how to conduct the action for the best result. You don't really know the persons involved, or how they reasonably think from their vast knowledge of the game, but in your opinion they are not doing what you think is correct. Your very weak image of your god leads you very astray from what real theists think.

God started the universe knowing that humans were His final goal. His methodology was fully thought out in advance. He had no need to experiment or create spectacles. Everything we know about are His deliberate creations. We theists don't second guess Him like you do. No wonder you are floundering around in a morass of your own human criticisms of a god which you describe, not realizing how much you are debating, from your strange viewpoint, with a humanized version. Note I do not capitalize your god versions.

QUOTE: “The discovery of the massive gelatinous string siphonophore—a floating colony of tiny individual zooids that clone themselves thousands of times into specialized bodies that string together to work as a team—was just one of the unique finds among some of the deepest fish and marine invertebrates ever recorded for Western Australia.”

dhw: Now this really is worth a new comment. You could hardly have a better description of how multicellularity works. All multicellular bodies are collections of cells that clone themselves thousands of times into specialized bodies that string together to work as a team. I have called them cell communities. My pet analogy has always been ant colonies, but maybe the siphonofore is even better. Thank you for this intriguing article.

These are simply single celled organisms clumped together, which again you have again exaggerated into one of your woolly hopes about out individual cell intelligence. Stromatolite mats are exactly the same, examples of a degree of simple cell cooperation for simple tasks.