Return to David's theory of evolution PART 1 (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, June 17, 2022, 13:10 (673 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: No dodge. Your complaint about my God doesn't recognize how I think about my God, as above.

dhw: You think about your God as having one purpose (us and our food), and therefore specially designing countless life forms and foods that had no connection with us. And you have no idea why he would have done so. I recognize that you think your God acts in a way which only he can make sense of.

DAVID: Thank you. We wouldn't be here, with God running evolution, unless His goal was to create us.

According to you, there is not one single extinct species that wouldn’t have been here unless his goal was to create them, and as the vast majority had no connection with us or our food, his goal could therefore not have been confined to creating us and our food.

Ediacaran-Cambrian transition: 410,000 years

dhw: You wrote: “We do not know how species appear or the theoretical times involved”, and you have totally ignored the argument that it is generations, not time that produce new species, and even 20,000 generations of intelligent cell communities could suffice for the production of new species. You call that a “hopeful explanation”. I call it a logical explanation, but of course it remains just as theoretical as your own: that an unknown eternal, universal mind preprogrammed or dabbled every change.

DAVID: So you brush off your hero's worry. Every species gap we have in fossils is millions of years except the Cambrian!!! Use the whale series as one example. There are many others. No examples of tiny genertional changes in fossils is ever found. All new species appear de novo. (Gould)

I’m not denying that the Cambrian explosion happened! No matter what theory you embrace, quite clearly there was a new and major development that accelerated speciation (maybe an increase in oxygen). And so in contrast to the long periods of stasis, with no innovations, the sudden change in conditions created a sudden burst of innovations. (This is what Gould called “punctuated equilibrium": periods of stasis punctuated by bursts of innovation.) And still you ignore the argument that it is generations, not time, that produce new species.

DAVID: We know of no biological process or processes that produce new species.

dhw: So why do you keep harping on about them?

DAVID: Because it is obvious evolution is based on new biochemistry being avaliable for new forms.

If we don’t know of any biological process that produces new species, how is it obvious that “new biochemistry” produces new species? What is obvious is that if you believe in common descent (as you claim to do), biochemical processes must lead to new uses of available materials.

Immunity system: lung cells

DAVID: In design theory it is reasonably proposed lungs were first designed with these cells in place, or lunged species would not have survived.

dhw: Alternatively, fatalities would have resulted in the surviving cells gradually learning to improve their design. (You seem to think that every disease would obliterate the whole species!) A parallel would be most of our human inventions, which worked OK originally but were gradually improved on by subsequent generations.

DAVID: After a time gap new species handle life very well. Means prepared in advance.

The time gap suggests to me that cells learn to handle the different demands. The “advance preparation” would be the provision of intelligence and flexibility, whereby the former uses the latter to adjust to changing conditions and requirements.