Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 14, 2021, 20:28 (1109 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Just opposite: species survive because of God's designs. Survival struggles do not drive evolution.

dhw: It is not the opposite! It is purpose and result: according to your theory, your God wanted organisms to survive, and so he designed ways in which they could survive, and so they survived because of his designs. The purpose of the evolutionary innovations was to enable organisms to survive – totally in keeping with Darwin’s theory.

DAVID: Absolutely no!!! "Evolutionary innovations" advanced evolution from bacteria. God's new designs drive evolution forward.

dhw: But a moment ago you were saying that God’s purpose in designing the innovations was to “guarantee survival”. How does that suddenly come to mean that the purpose of the innovations absolutely wasn’t to enable organisms to survive?

God's purpose is to advance evolutionary steps to reach us. Survival must be guaranteed so each step survives until the next step is designed from it.

Xenobots
DAVID: This is not puzzling to me. The clumps of skin cells are simply following the instructions they have in their DNA.

dhw: I’m surprised their DNA tells them to accomplish tasks in a way that surprises the researchers. It all sounds to me very much like the form of intelligence exhibited by bacteria and viruses, which also have no brains and yet all too frequently manage to outsmart us by intelligently “re-using what’s at hand”.

DAVID: The bacteria and viruses follow instructions they were given by God.

dhw: And of course you firmly believe that the future will reveal to us all God’s good intentions in instructing Covid-19 to kill millions of people.

Millions not killed yet, and I fully believe the virus is a free-will Chinese invention.

Survival in bacteria

DAVID: In evolution what is invented in the past is used in the present, so the 99% gone directly relate to humans. Also this study shows how survival is guaranteed by design, which had to be present in the first bacterial designed organisms.

dhw: How on earth does the current survival of bacteria prove that the separately designed and extinct brontosaurus plus the rest of the separately designed and extinct 99% are directly related to humans, although you have already agreed that the brontosaurus and the separately designed and extinct 99% had no direction connection to humans?

No direct time relationship, with a gap of 64 million years, but a stepwise design relationship through evolution, which you inexplicably constantly avoid recognizing.

dhw: Survival is not “guaranteed” by design if 99% of life forms failed to survive! But yes, life goes on in ever changing forms. The only form that has survived since the beginning is bacteria, so at best you can only claim that your God seems to have guaranteed the survival of bacteria. So what is that meant to prove?

Guaranteed only until the next step is present. The 99% were designed to fail, making room for next larger populations.

How reliable is science? Radioactive dating>

dhw: I like the heading you have given to this thread! You never commented on the hilarious entry the other day under Cambrian:

“The window of time between the latest appearance date (LAD) of the alien Ediacaran biota and the first appearance date (FAD) of the complex Cambrian biota was only 410,000 years. You read that correctly, just 410 thousand years! This is not an educated guess but based on very precise radiometric U-Pb dating with an error margin of only plus-minus 200 thousand years.”

dhw: Very precise, with an error margin of only 50%!

Precise enough to make the point, sticking a dagger into the heart of Darwin's gradualism, recognized by Gould who pointed out all the unexplained large gaps in Darwin's tree