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

by dhw, Sunday, May 22, 2022, 07:59 (914 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Without the diversity of forms, necessary ecosystems cannot form. Without ecosystems no one eats!! When will dhw recognize it with its true implications?

dhw: Usual question: necessary for what? How were 3.X billion years’ worth of extinct organisms and ecosystems “necessary” for current humans and our current food?

DAVID: I described a long winding course overtime in the other thread: necessary ecosystems for food for all.

Dealt with on the other thread. “Food for all” does not mean that 3.x billion years’ worth of food supplies for countless extinct organisms were “an absolute requirement for the evolutionary process to finally produce humans”, bearing in mind that according to you, the “evolutionary process” means God specially designing every species and econiche. Please stop repeating these vague generalisations.

DAVID: What you do not seem to grasp is I simply accept what God did, and that makes perfect sense to me, knowing He did it from His own reasoning.

Dealt with on the other thread. Please stop conflating your personal, illogical and inexplicable theory about God’s purpose and method with the objective facts of the history.

dhw: Do you think I have spent my whole life in an armchair talking only to agnostics? Please stick to the arguments, and stop pretending that all believers agree with all your beliefs.

DAVID: Yes, beliefs come in a variety of forms. My form of belief was perfectly comfortable with IDer's I met. The way you propose to think about God has always been foreign to me, probing, doubting, and always conceiving of Him as partially human in thought.

You and ID-ers and all religious folk would be comfortable with the theory that God exists. But your antipathy towards the possibility that God has thought patterns and emotions similar to ours would be bitterly opposed by most of the religious folk I know, and you have never yet succeeded in finding one single name to back the combination of contradictions that make up your theory of evolution, as dissected ad nauseam on this and the other thread.

Gene continuity

DAVID: I will simply repeat, only a designed evolution by a designer can produce the gaps we see.

dhw: Yes, you use the gaps to prove the existence of a designer. But gaps by definition are the very opposite of continuity, which you also claim to believe in. And you can’t see any contradiction.

DAVID: Even Darwin saw both continuity and the Cambrian gap. In this case I agree with Darwin and you don't.

Please identify any passage in Darwin which states that the Cambrian gaps denote God’s intervention by designing new species without any precursors. The gaps remain a mystery, but Darwin expressly states: “I believe the answer mainly lies in the record being incomparably less perfect than is generally proposed.” (Difficulties of Theory) You disagree with Darwin, and once again you gloss over the contradiction between your belief in continuity and your belief in gaps.

DAVID: My definition of common descent and yours are not the same. Mine fits the current knowledge of the biochemistry of the genome. I have no idea what yours really is or how it fits into current knowledge.

dhw: I have told you mine: that all species (except the very first cells) are descended from preceding species. The article appears to confirm this theory. Now please tell us your own definition.

DAVID: The same as always: biochemical continuity with phenotypical gaps, which fits the current science. As an example, we use mouse brains to explain ours. Both mammals from an ancestor who lived with dinosaurs. Fits your theory perfectly.

Yes, we and mice are believed to have evolved from a common ancestor about 75 million years ago, which fits Darwin’s theory perfectly. What does that have to do with the appearance of brains and vertebrates about 500 million years ago – according to you, in species which had no precursors and from which we and mice are descended. You seem to think that by adding the tag “phenotypical” you can gloss over the fact that gaps break continuity. And if there is no continuity, you can hardly claim that humans were God’s one and only goal from the very beginning. (One might also ask why mice – like maple seed pods - were “an absolute requirement for the evolutionary process [i.e. God] to finally produce humans”.