Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, September 23, 2021, 09:32 (948 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I’m only quoting you in order to agree with you. As the quote states explicitly, such tiny variations clearly DON’T drive evolution. But you won’t agree with my next proposal! What does drive it is the quest for survival, triggered by major changes in conditions which require or allow for major changes in the anatomy: for instance, life on land switching to life in the water, or vice versa.

DAVID: I don't accept it. Survival is necessary as God engineers each next species from the last.

dhw: So when your God operated on the legs of pre-whales to change them into flippers [...] the need for flippers had nothing to do with helping the new species to survive in the water.

DAVID: Of course He prepared then for survival in their new environment. That is what I wrote above. Your Darwin training persists: my view survival does not drive evolution.

It is not survival but the quest for survival. In your theory, this means that instead of organisms adapting to or exploiting new conditions, your God looks into his crystal ball, sees the new environment coming, and so fulfils the quest for survival by dabbling the changes he hasn’t already preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago (e.g. changing legs into flippers). These are the changes that cause speciation. So how can preparations for survival come to mean that survival is not the purpose of preparations for survival? And how come "purpose" is not the driving force behind an action?