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

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 06, 2022, 15:38 (960 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: Enjoyment and interest are not “events” but possible motives for and results of events, and I don’t know what you mean by “secondary”.

Secondary is obvious in my view of God. God purposefully creates as a primary event. His own responses to the results occur after creation.

dhw: 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?

They are your implications coming from your biased view of a humanized God. I carefully avoid granting those human responses to God's reasoning

God's choice of war over peace

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

dhw: 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!

Just a big IF based on your strange desire to have God give up control over speciation. Taht desire weakens God? Is that what you want?

Shapiro

dhw: 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.

You have conflated his theory for speciation into brilliant cells running the show in the everyday processes of life..

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.

dhw: 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?

You have never understood the delicate balances of well maintained ecosystems. Each animal contributes in its own special way. The article continues the pecking away at Darwin orthodoxy. This web is not your desired definition. This web of interactions had a definite directionality to an endpoint.