Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, April 15, 2021, 11:09 (1109 days ago) @ David Turell

Survival
dhw: […] 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?

DAVID: 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.

Now each of the 1% of life forms relevant to humans has to survive until it is no longer required, and so – just as with the other 99% - your God specially designs all the innovations to ensure their survival until they die. And somehow this means that he specially designs the innovations to enable them to survive (until they die), but he does NOT specially design their innovations to enable them to survive (until they die). Bewildering!

Survival in bacteria
DAVID: . 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?

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

Are you now telling us that your God organized a step-by-step direct line between the brontosaurus (plus food supply) and us (plus food supply)? Not to mention any one of the other 99% of specially designed and extinct life forms plus food supplies. This really will cause a sensation in the scientific world.

Xenobots
dhw: […] 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.

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

Oh well, how about all the viruses and bacteria that killed millions of people before we learned how to invent viruses?

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%!

DAVID: 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.

I was simply giving an example of scientific "reliability". Gradualism is relative. The theory of cellular intelligence “drives a dagger” into the heart of those who claim that half a million years (thousands of generations) is not enough time for new organs to evolve, and therefore they must have been intelligently designed by God. Intelligence could have done it in the time allowed. And now we have the possibility that intelligence did indeed do the designing – namely that of intelligent cells which could have been designed by your God.

Our special gait
DAVID: No other biped walked/walks as we do:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-steps-book-bipedalism-human-evolution-anatomy...

DAVID: No question, we are unique in so many ways not explained by any natural theory of evolution. This is only one aspect of our bodies' unusual postures and and our unusual dexterity of how we can make our bodies move.

Yes, we are unique, and we are the product of many stages of evolution. I doubt if any evolutionist would disagree. Why do we have to keep repeating this? The controversy in our own discussions concerns your insistence that this means we were your God’s only purpose, and he specially designed every other life form and food bush “as part of the goal of evolving (= specially designing) humans” (plus food bush).