Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Friday, April 16, 2021, 12:25 (1107 days ago) @ David Turell

Survival
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.

dhw:...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!

DAVID: Sorry about your confusion. Is evolution stepwise as more complexity appears? Each step sets up the appearance of the next step. Perfectly sensible.
And
DAVID: Each new step is an advance from the older steps. All steps required. Until you recognize this necessity you will remain confused.

Yes, it is sensible, except when you pretend that each step along each of the hundreds (thousands?) of diverse branches is a step towards humans! But do tell us how azhdarchid pterosaur was a required “step towards” humans and their food supply.

How reliable is science? Radioactive dating
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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The study going back 540 million years about was +/- 200,000 years which means the gap was 200,000 years to 600,000 years, a tiny amount of time to bring all the complex Cambrians into existence , just as Darwin fussed about it, noting no precursors. All you have done is talk around it with no answers.

You believe that a possible answer is your intelligent God having enough time to design all the new complexities. Why then is it not an answer to propose (theistic version) that your God designed a form of intelligence which would give organisms enough time to design all the new complexities?

Our special gait
dhw: 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).

DAVID: Yes, you find my view of God's works as controversial. I'm not surprised.

That’s a relief. You would only have been surprised if you thought you had offered a logical explanation for your theory.

Gene expression like dimmer switch
QUOTE: Dimmer switch gene regulation may allow cells to fine-tune their responses to multi-input environments on both physiological and evolutionary time scales.

DAVID: Another very carefully designed system which creates gene expression activity depending on different sugar concentrations. We can see how iT is done step by step, but still have no way of understanding the underlying mechanisms of control. That is still a total black box.

Once more, we have support for the idea that cells RESPOND to new requirements. You are, of course, quite right that we don’t understand the mechanisms of control, but autonomous intelligence (perhaps God-given) should be recognized as one possibility.