Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 17, 2021, 13:38 (1373 days ago) @ David Turell

Evol: always advancing or not?

QUOTE: "[…] it calls into doubt whether true fitness maxima exist and, more broadly, it implies that directionality and progress in evolution may be illusory.'"

DAVID: Basically evolution can go back and forth, not steadily forward

But one would have thought that a God who, according to you, had just one purpose and was always in full control of evolution, would have moved steadily forward in his pursuit of his goal. Hence my repeating ad nauseam my question why you think he didn’t, and your ad nauseam insistence that it’s all logical though you have no idea why he would have fulfilled his purpose this way.

Extreme extremophiles

QUOTE: "Learning more about how the organisms have adapted to their freezing home far from food may also give us clues about how life evolved […]

DAVID: Just more evidence showing how tough life is, surviving everywhere.

It is truly amazing. Note that even you lay emphasis on survival as the prime purpose of life forms. It makes you wonder if this astonishing ability of organisms to adapt to all conditions isn’t evidence of an in-built mechanism both for adaptation and for speciation, as opposed to your 3.8 billion-year-old computer programme for all undabbled life forms and food supplies “as part of the goal of evolving humans”.

High speed claw snapping

DAVID: […] my preferred view is the coding for advancement was pre-inserted long before new advanced forms appeared.

dhw: So was this “coding” a specific programme designed 3.8 billion years ago for every single advancement in the history of evolution? Or did your God pop in from time to time to insert new programmes long before they were needed? Or could it have been in the form of a mechanism which could work out advancements as and when required or facilitated?

DAVID: God either programs in advance or steps in to dabble. Adaptations do not lead to speciation, and that is as far as organisms can go on their own.

It is sometimes impossible to draw a clear line between adaptation and speciation: one can argue that legs becoming flippers is adaptation to new conditions, and every other stage in the switch from pre-whale to whale is the same. But I’m not pretending to know how all innovations originated! That is one of the many mysteries we all grapple with. Hence such theories as divine pre-planning, divine dabbling, random mutations and cellular intelligence.

Physical change in speciation

QUOTE: "...neo-Darwinism must explain not only how hardware features mutated into existence but also how the biological operating software came into existence and could then be modified successfully in dramatic ways.
***
"Materialist thinkers contend that every feature of brain, mind, and consciousness arose via cause-effect physics and chemistry accounted for by neo-Darwinism. In that case, they first need to explain how biological software is created and stored in animals, and then how such software can be mutated by accident just in time to operate new biological hardware. Solve those problems first, before claiming human consciousness is mere biochemistry."

Yet another article flogging the case against chance, which we agreed on long ago. Why don’t these good folk consider the possibility that the ability of ALL organisms to change their structures lies in a form of intelligence which has gradually evolved into the superintelligence of human self-awareness? ALL organisms are composed of cells, and even you believe in common descent. This means that throughout thousands of millions of years, cells have learned to cooperate and combine in forming one new structure after another. You believe these were divinely programmed or dabbled, but the cells would still have had to cooperate and combine, whether he did it or they did it for themselves. The PROCESS of restructuring is the same. Hardware/software is an unnecessary image. Of course all parts of the organism must function together if it is to survive. The great problem is how the ability of cells to reorganize themselves arose in the first place, which is the same as asking what is the origin of life. Nobody knows.

Chimps ‘r’ not us

Nobody ever said they were.

DAVID: We may have 98% similar bases with chimps but the 3-D DNA's are at least 78% different as discussed in our past entries.

Do you believe we are descended from apes or don’t you?

Immunity from Neanderthals

DAVID: A little interbreeding helped us sapiens folks. This has been discussed before when it was found that Neanderthal genes help our general immunity. This is a more specific case. dhw asked in the past why God would produce so many varieties of hominin/homo types and this result offers a reason.

No it doesn’t. If H. sapiens was the only species he wanted, and if he is always in total control of evolution, why this roundabout way of doing it? (In anticipation of your stock reply, no, I am not questioning God. I am questioning your interpretation of your hypothetical God's purpose and method in creating the evolutionary process.