Innovation and Speciation: aquatic mammals avoid bends (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, December 06, 2020, 12:53 (1447 days ago) @ David Turell

Denton
DAVID: Onboard species design is way to complex for cell intelligence. You are still extrapolating Shapiro well beyond what he presents.

This is getting silly. “Living cells and organisms are cognitive (sentient) entities…they have the ability to alter their hereditary characteristics rapidly…evolutionary novelty arises from the production of new cell and multicellular structures as a result of cellular cell-modification…” Please stop pretending Shapiro hasn’t said what you yourself have quoted. And stop pretending that his theory is confined to bacteria.

Aquatic mammals
DAVID: I suggested God's ability to directly create humans was limited. That involves two considerations: 1) God had some personal limitation OR as I've constantly suggested He had to set up a NECESSARY FOOD SUPPLY before our population exploded, something He LOGICALLY would expect. God's personal limitations must always be considered for completeness, but I can chose the resulting theory that seems most logical to me, if not to you.

Ah, I thought you’d dropped the idea that your God had personal limitations and was incapable of doing what he wanted to do in the way that he wanted to do it. I really can’t see why this “limited ability” could not mean that he was experimenting. Please explain. The necessary food supply for humans argument has been demolished by yourself (see quotes under “fish to land animals”)..

Primate vision
DAVID:A perfect system with no changes and the surprise of a researcher noted in bold. No changing mutations implies controlled design.

dhw: It certainly does, and congratulations to the designer. But if God exists and he did this directly, one can’t help wondering why he didn’t get every system “perfect” in the first place. Maybe he just kept on experimenting, or getting new ideas, or had invented an autonomous mechanism which hit the jackpot straight away this time, but otherwise simply went on adjusting its inventions as the need or opportunity arose.

DAVID: Same old humanizing. You would probably propose our universe is the first in a line of failed experiments which didn't get to adequate fine tuning to allow life. The implication is God has to know what life requires as He constructs universes. Your God CANNOT EVER BE my God.

Back to the subject: according to you, your God designed the perfect eye system in one go. Please explain, then, why he didn’t design the only species (plus food supply) that he wanted to design in one go. If he has limitations, then again, what is wrong with the experimentation theory? Your other explanation is that in order to design H. sapiens and his food supply, he "had to" keep designing millions of extinct life forms and food supplies, although 99% of them had no connection with humans. And you think this is logical?

“Fine tuning of water” and “new extremophiles”

DAVID: I don't have to explain water's weirdness. God purposely designed it this way so life could form. dhw thinks God has to experiment. God knows exactly what He is doing. Everything that has appeared is clearly interlocking by design.

DAVID: Glad these guys aren't around to bother us. It goes to show God made sure life was tough enough to survive here and evolve us under His direction.

If God exists, I’m quite happy to agree that he designed all the factors that made life possible. I hatched the experimentation theory specifically to give some logic to your anthropocentric theory of evolution, but it can be applied just as well to the universe and to our planet, with all the endless comings and goings; and water would have been just one of his inventions on the experimental path to creating life. But if we return to the context of evolution, I don’t think he “has to experiment”. That is only one theory. Another, you may remember, is that he invented the original intelligent cell with its autonomous potential for the vast number of combinations and variations that make up the ever changing history of life.