More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Friday, April 01, 2022, 11:45 (728 days ago) @ David Turell

Bird migration

DAVID: […] Since I don't see how the birds worked it out by themselves, I think God did it. I can't go beyond that. Your question is based on God made them do it. And I am sure He is capable of arranging it. As for why God made that choice, that is your problem. I just accept what God did. Remember He has his own reasons that make sense to Him, but may not to us. You don't think about God as I do.

No, I assume that since he is purposeful, there is a purpose behind what he does.
YOUR BIRDS: We don’t like the winter. What can we do?

GOD: Come with me. I’ll take you to a nice warm spot 10,000 miles away (don’t ask me why), feed you on the way and show you how to use the wind and weather. I’m doing this because bird migration is necessary for the existence of humans and their food.

MY BIRDS: We don’t like the winter. Let’s see if we can find somewhere warmer.

Monarch migration

QUOTE:"It’s spring, and monarchs are on the move. Every year the butterflies leave their dense winter clusters near Mexico City and head for northern latitudes. It will take four months and three generations to get there. Once they arrive, the butterflies will get busy boosting their company enough to survive next year’s winter. […]

DAVID: […] Four generations means four metamorphoses! They feed on milkweed flowers, nothing else. They have to follow the flowering seasons and where they go in Mexico is specific to one mountain area near Mexico City. And dhw think they decided this with their own brains functioning for the planning.

Why the heck would your God design such a complicated process just for one species of butterfly? Does our survival depend on it? My guess is that when it all began, monarchs had no idea where they were heading, but they had to stop en route because they only live for about a month, and they still hadn’t found the right spot. You are obsessed with planning. Our fellow organisms find methods of survival, and when they do, these methods are perpetuated.

Other birds’ braininess
"A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and California Polytechnic State University, has found that the broken wing tactic used by some birds to lure predators away from their nest is more widespread than previously thought.

DAVID: apparently an easily learned and copied tactic.

And yet another form of evidence that birds, just like all life forms, have the intelligence to devise their own methods of survival. Or do you think your God popped in to teach the birds, as he once did apparently to teach opossums how to feign death.

Natures wonders: some bird sex organs are weird

They certainly are. I can’t help wondering why these weird rape-protection kits for ducks were so essential for the design of humans and our food.

Vampire bats and snakes

DAVID: I think we have had a past agreement: loss of genes creates adaptations.

dhw: No. The agreement was that adaptations lead to loss of genes.

DAVID: We're back to arguing which came first. All we know is some adaptation are associated with loss of genes. We do not know which came first.

dhw: This is still a long way from your original claim that “evolution advances with loss of genes”. The snake example seems to make the order clear: […]. Its ancestors had legs, but in a certain environment, sliding was more efficient than walking, and legs became redundant and ended up as vestigial structures. Adaptation leads to loss. Loss does not lead to adaptation.

DAVID: Genes have to disappear for legs to disappear. Legs just don't drop off leaving genes intact. You have forgotten genes make the legs to start with.

dhw: Of course they don’t drop off leaving the genes intact. They don’t drop off anyway – snakes still have vestigial legs. It is the fact that they are no longer used that makes the genes redundant. […]

DAVID: You are missing the underlying point: If there are no legs, the genes will be gone.

Obviously.

DAVID: When legs are gone what was the driving cause to delete genes? You will scream cell intelligence and I will invoke God. As usual.

The driving force for the loss of legs and deletion of the genes would have been the fact that in a particular environment, legs were of no use. Since the legs were of no use, they and their genes became redundant. This is in contrast to your theory that for no particular reason the genes disappeared and therefore the legs disappeared. Why must you invoke God?


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum