Return to David's theory of evolution PARTS 1 & 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 06, 2022, 11:00 (744 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] since you have guessed that your God enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, I don’t see how you can then guess that he can’t possibly do his creating because he enjoys creating something that interests him.

DAVID: I view God as creating without self interest. Enjoying and being interested are secondary events.

Enjoyment and interest are not “events” but possible motives for and results of events, and I don’t know what you mean by “secondary”. Do you think your God didn’t know he enjoyed creating and would be interested in his creations? You’ve also guessed that he wants us to admire his work and have a relationship with him, and you agree that he probably has thought patterns and emotions similar to ours and we mimic him. I’ve taken your guesses as possible purposes for his creation of life, including humans. Why do you wish to downplay the possible implications of your own guesses?

DAVID: Your view of my theistic belief system is illogical. I'll stick with Adler while you stick with Shapiro.

dhw: Adler doesn’t cover your illogical theory of evolution, and Shapiro does not even mention God. Stop dodging.

DAVID: Adler uses the evolution of humans as a proof of God. Your complaint is totally off point.

That IS my point. I have no complaint against his argument. My complaint, as you know, is against the illogical notion that your God designed every species, econiche and natural wonder as “part of the goal of evolving [= designing] humans” and our food, although the majority did not lead to humans and our food. (See also the “web” article below.)

God's choice of war over peace

DAVID: God designed a mixture. Free-living organisms have a choice with free will.[…]. It may be that God realized a freedom to chose energy sources might allow more adequate intake of energy. […]

dhw: […] I’m delighted that you now accept the possibility that he gave organisms the freedom to choose their energy sources – as opposed to his designing them all and finding that they made “errors” which he could not always control.

DAVID: I've always viewed animals as having freedom of external actions.

The question is why your God designed life as a “constant war of survival by eating”. You believe he deliberately designed the carnivores, so they had no freedom: they had to kill. But if he gave organisms free will to design the innovations that lead to speciation – based on finding efficient ways to “take in energy” – then we have a possible answer to the problem of theodicy: he didn’t design survival by killing, whether through “bad” viruses or meat-eating. Instead he designed “free-living organisms” that “have a choice with free will” (= a free-for-all). Nice and logical!

Shapiro

dhw: He refers to cells in general…

DAVID: Still based entirely on bacterial research.

I’m delighted that you now acknowledge the intelligence of bacteria, have no doubt Shapiro would have considered other people’s research, and repeat that I have quoted his theory in his own words, and have neither inflated nor misused it.

Epigenetics

DAVID: It is obviously not a solution for the problem of understanding how speciation works. It appears to be related to very minor alterations.

dhw: Nobody knows how speciation works, but the snake example might help us. The environment makes legs a nuisance, but the sliding movement itself leads to further changes in the anatomy […] . There can be no question about these changes eventually proving to be hereditary, and I would say this is how snakes became a new species. I think we would both agree that environment triggered what became very major alterations. You will say God dabbled. I would suggest that intelligent cells restructured themselves according to current needs.

DAVID: And I respond cells are programmed to respond to changes with minor modifications.

Do you think your God dabbled with the pre-snake as preparation for humans and our food?

Evolution as a web

The latest interrelationships show a web, not a bush:

https://aeon.co/essays/why-evolution-is-not-a-tree-of-life-but-a-fuzzy-network

QUOTE: "The hypothesis of reticulate evolution is that species are not as isolated from each other as Haeckel’s branching trees propose. Instead, species both diverge and merge together. The tree of life doesn’t look like a tree so much as the reticulated pattern of a python’s skin.

DAVID: a very new view. Hybridization and gene transfer are very active processes. Humans are an interconnected part of the web at its endpoint. Let's hope dhw doesn't try to slice it up.

If you believe all species evolved – as Darwin says – from a few forms or one, then of course there will be genes in common. I don’t know what the author means by species “merging”. By definition species (broad sense) are separate, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have genes in common. A web doesn’t have an endpoint. As you said earlier, every species is connected through its biochemical basis, but I find it absurd to conclude that we and our food supplies are directly descended from, say, brontosauruses, especially bearing in mind your theory that your God designed every species individually as “preparation” for us plus food. Would he have been unable to design us plus food without having designed the brontosaurus?