Return to David's theory of evolution PART 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 05, 2022, 09:41 (870 days ago) @ David Turell

The first entry is covered in Part One.

The Cambrian Gap

dhw: As you have edited out parts of my earlier response, please tell me the authoritative source for your theory that an unknown mind programmed these inventions 3.8 billion years ago, or popped in 550 million years ago to cobble together new organ systems and eyes (although all he ever wanted to do was design sapiens and our food). Of course we can only come up with theories. Why have you ignored the perfectly reasonable proposal that speciation happens when conditions change, and that although there were long periods of stasis when conditions did not change, the Cambrian was an exception, and whatever may have been the change was sufficiently drastic to allow for major innovations? And why do you consider it unreasonable to assume that changes take place from generation to generation, regardless of the time that elapses between bursts of innovation?

DAVID: More blather about how speciation may occur because you cannot answer my challenge, that the Cambrian is like no other gap and requires tremendous amounts of new designs in a figurative blink of the eye.

dhw: I keep agreeing with your “challenge”, and have offered explanations. A “figurative blink of the eye” is not a real blink if you take into consideration the fact that common descent works through changes in existing life forms, which means generations and not periods of time.

DAVID: TIME is a major issue for the Cambrian. There is no 'gradual change in existing forms'. You just made my case for abrupt design.

I did not say there was a gradual change! My point is that the change in environmental conditions must have been such that it allowed for major innovations, and that innovations do not depend on the passage of time but on the response of each generation to the new conditions. I find it feasible that intelligent, inventive organisms would respond within very few generations.

dhw: (see above) […] whatever may have been the change was sufficiently drastic to allow for major innovations [...]

DAVID: The bold is sheer sophistry. Changed conditions allow for change but are never the actual driving cause, are they?

dhw: When I say the change must have been sufficiently drastic “to allow for major innovations”, I mean “to allow for innovations”. Why is that sophistry? The driving force is the will of life forms to survive and/or improve their chances of survival. I propose that this will exerts itself whenever existing conditions change. We know that life forms adapt (or die), and I suggest that when conditions allow for new means of survival, intelligent cells produce “evolutionary novelty” (Shapiro). Whatever environmental changes took place during the Cambrian must have allowed for this process to be accelerated – and that is true whether your God did his dabbling, or intelligent cells (perhaps designed by your God) did their own designing.

DAVID: Same long discussion to avoid the logic of required design to explain the enormous changes in a short time.

You accused me of sophistry by totally ignoring what I had written, and then you raised the question of the driving force, which I answered, and you have ignored the fact that I accept the argument for design, but instead of your God preprogramming every innovation 3.8 billion years ago, or performing millions of operations or (Cambrian) starting all over again by designing species without precursors, I propose that he gave cell communities the ability to do their own designing.

DAVID: Another non-answer. Handing off a design project to another designer creates more difficulty than it is worth, if a specific goal is required. The first designer must instruct the second designer or, in your case, brilliant cell design committees.

dhw: What specific goal? Back you go to ignoring all the illogicalities that arise from your anthropocentric theory of evolution. Maybe your God did NOT start out with the one goal of designing humans plus food. Or maybe he did NOT design every individual life form etc. Or maybe he did NOT design new species without precursors. Maybe he designed a free-for-all, but dabbled occasionally when he felt like it. Or maybe one of my other alternative theistic theories is true. At least they make sense to you, unlike your own.

DAVID: Back you go to an entirely humanized God bumbling along. Of course, in this humanized form your proposals make sense. God is a person like no other person. I wish you would remember that.

My God is not “entirely humanized”, and he does not “bumble along”, and I do not imagine for one moment that a sourceless, eternal, all-powerful, immaterial, conscious being is a person like us. But you agree that your possible Creator probably has thought patterns in common with his creations (us), and “I wish you would remember that” and would stop pretending that you alone know which thought patterns he has or hasn’t got. However, I must admit that I have a certain prejudice which puts me more in tune with theories that make sense to me and you than with theories which don't even make sense to their proposer (you).