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

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 21, 2022, 16:33 (884 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Your combined theories “make sense only to God” – and as far as I know, you are not God.

DAVID: I accept that God knows/knew exactly how to evolve all: your incredulous bold.

dhw: If God exists, of course he does/did. That doesn’t mean his purpose was the one you impose on him, or the totally illogical method you impose on him to fulfil that purpose. Since it “makes sense only to God”, it does not make sense to you, so why do you keep defending it?

I cannot be inside God's brain to know His reasoning. I can only see what He produced and therefore this last stage of humans was His purposeful act.

dhw: Yes, it is your belief. What “evidence”? All we know is that history shows a vast bush of organisms, most of which are extinct and did NOT lead to humans (the latest species) or our food. Hence the illogicality of your belief.

But humans are here after all that bushiness development, and is our food, which you ignore..

dhw: If you believe in common descent, then your God would take an existing species and introduce an innovation from one generation to the next...Do you believe in common descent, i.e. that all life forms except the first are directly descended from earlier life forms.

DAVID: Yes, based on continuous development of ever more complex biochemistry allowing gaps in form by the designer God.

dhw: By “gaps in form” do you mean species with no precursors (the opposite of common descent)? If not, what do you mean?

Darwin's common descent meant itty bitty changes by generations. That does not exist in the fossil record. There are gaps. I don't view that definition of common descent as fitting the known record. So you can stick with orthodox Darwin but I don't have to.

Ediacaran-Cambrian transition: 410,000 years

dhw: This may well be true, and if it is, I’ve offered you a list of reasons why there may be no more fossils, but you dismiss them all because the list was written in 2019!

DAVID: And three years later we find the Cambrian gap is 410,000 years in size based on existing fossil studies. What would the 2019 writers say now!

dhw: The 2019 writers offer a list of reasons why there may be no more fossils. Nothing to do with the length of the Cambrian gap. Stop dodging.

DAVID: Stop dodging. Has everything to do with the Cambrian gap.

dhw: You continue to ignore reasons why the fossil record is incomplete, so here are some of them, selected from various websites:

The fossil record certainly has gaps, mostly because the conditions required to create fossils have been rare ever since life began on Earth. A very small percentage of animals that have lived and died ever became fossils. Thus, many pieces of the puzzle are missing; some will never be found.

Soft tissue fossilization is rare […] due to decomposition and scavengers.

Sediment has to cover an organism’s remains in order for the long fossilization process to begin. Most organisms decompose before this can happen.

Fossils may be set in stone, but they’re far from impervious. Like all rocks, they erode, melt and fragment.

dhw: You expect a record of every species and transition, with bodies preserved for hundreds of millions of years. Every new fossil creates a sensation precisely because preservation is so unlikely. But because there’s a new calculation that the Cambrian gap was only 410,000 years, you think none of the above reasons can possibly be valid any more, and there should be a complete fossil record of every organism that evolved 540 million years ago!

I know all those theories and fossil facts, just you do. The new discovery of such a short time has fossils on both sides. Nothing is absent! So we have huge phenotypic change opposite to Darwin theory, exactly Darwin's worry about his theory. In your view this lack of precursors destroys the theory of common descent. No it doesn't! Common descent theory takes a new form. Theories are maleable, but not yours, obviously.