Innovation and Speciation: aquatic mammals avoid bends (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, November 29, 2020, 09:32 (1454 days ago) @ David Turell

Thank you for a variety of articles. I still marvel at your capacity for following all these developments, and for editing the articles to make it easier for us to get the drift. This is an ongoing education, which alone makes it worth continuing with the website.

Brief comments:
Innovation and speciation
QUOTE: “The results reveal that dolphins, and possibly other marine mammals, may consciously alter their heart rate to suit the length of their planned dive. "Dolphins have the capacity to vary their reduction in heart rate as much as you and I are able to reduce how fast we breathe," suggests Fahlman. "This allows them to conserve oxygen during their dives, and may also be key to avoiding diving-related problems such as decompression sickness, known as "the bends." '"

I would take this as evidence that the cell communities of which all organisms are composed adapt to new requirements. I doubt if all the dolphins consciously tell themselves to reduce their heart rate.

Denton

QUOTE: “The chemical workings of the cell reveal that matter is a Lego set with designated pieces predestined to be assembled to what we call life."

DAVID: The alternative view is The Anthropic Principal which says if things weren't this way we wouldn't be here. The fine-tuning argument is taken to its extreme by the book. I'll stay with fine-tuning versus chance. After all, how to explain our unexpected arrival? Nothing from Darwin anticipates us.

As always, I regard the complexities of the cell as the most powerful argument for design against chance, but I have no idea why you are so fixated on “us”. Why was the brontosaurus expected and we weren’t? And expected by whom? Darwin is concerned not with “anticipation” of species but with their origin. Yes, we are extraordinary and unique with our levels of consciousness, and there is a case to be made that if God exists, he wanted to create a being with thought patterns and emotions and other attributes similar to his own. But please don’t pretend that only humans are “unexpected” descendants from bacteria!

Fish to land
QUOTE: "'Moreover we see similarities between the fish and land animals, suggesting that some muscle-brain-skull arrangements were already primed for living on land." (David’s bold)

DAVID: Note the bold. Who did the priming? Certainly not Darwin mechanisms. This is just like the 20+ million year old monkey noted in my bool The Atheist Delusion which had lumbar bone changes suggesting upright posture was coming! God anticipates change in evolution, based on these findings.

Of course there are similarities, which would result from common descent. It is assumed that life began in the water. From then on, as life developed over millions and millions and millions of years, organisms moved from water to land to water to land to water to land. Some even lived/live in both environments. It’s hardly surprising that “some muscle-brain-skull arrangements” were handed down. Why your God should have preprogrammed or dabbled every individual muscle-brain-skull arrangement for every individual species when, according to you, all he wanted was us and our food supply, remains a mystery for you to solve.

Under “Genome complexity”:
Quote: "In general, cells use similar working mechanisms from a common ancestor. They all learned the same tricks as long as these tricks were useful.'"

A nice way of summing up the way evolution works: cells use the mechanisms in order to devise and hand on new tricks.