More miscellany Part ONE (General)

by David Turell @, Wednesday, September 07, 2022, 15:23 (568 days ago) @ dhw

PART ONE
DAVID: Wonderful. You've solved the puzzle of speciation. I fully understand human variability.

dhw: So you don’t think other animals might have varying degrees of intelligence? Nobody has “solved the puzzle of speciation”, but I take it you now accept the reasonableness of my explanation for the fact that our ancestors diverged from chimps.

I'll stick with God designed bipedalism. Yours is reasonable Darwinism.


New Zealand

QUOTE: […] Evolutionary history is full of strange twists and turns, but also dead ends.[/b]" (dhw’s bold.)


DAVID: Our world is struggling to have enough food for everyone. That should tell you how important the ecosystems are.

dhw: Of course ecosystems are important! Every organism and ecosystem in the history of life has had to have food! That does not mean that every extinct organism and ecosystem in the history of life was an “absolute requirement” in preparation for us and our ecosystems! Please stop this silly dodging!

Stop forgetting, the present giant ecosystems are a result of past evolution. Your dodge is to try and forget the past!


Importance of ecosysems

DAVID: The systems are here descended from their ancestor systems. You can't deny it!!!

dhw: As a believer in evolution and common descent, I have never denied that we and our fellow organisms are descended from past ancestors! What I challenge is your theory that every single organism that ever existed, including all those that were NOT our ancestors or the ancestors of our current foods, were “absolute requirements” in preparation for us. Please stop dodging!

God created everything, so your complaint is anti-God. He wanted everything that appeared to appear. Your dodge is from your agnosticism.


Whales and hippos

QUOTE: “The best they can do is suggest that when organisms live in similar environments, their evolution is constrained in such a way that they develop anatomical similarities that help them survive better.”

dhw: Not “constrained”. It is sheer common sense that if organisms are faced with similar problems, they will come up with similar solutions.

dhw: Do you agree?

Constrained is correct. Your quote supports it.


QUOTE: “… phenomenon of convergence presents fundamental problems for evolutionary biologists who continue to argue that life is historically contingent (contingent meaning it happened by chance and could just as easily have happened differently).”

dhw: A misleading definition: “contingent” also entails dependence on certain factors - in this case environmental changes. These may happen by chance. But some organisms adapt autonomously, and so maybe by extension the same autonomous mechanisms could also design innovations that improve chances of survival and lead to speciation. Not by chance!

dhw: Do you agree?

No. God designs.


QUOTE: “two coordinated mutations in such long-lived creatures as hippos and whales would take 200 million years to occur by chance.” (David’s bold).

dhw: Same again. You are all obsessed with Darwin’s random mutations. But at least you had the good grace to reproduce Shapiro’s theory of cellular intelligence in your brilliant book The Atheist Delusion. Your buddies never even consider it.

DAVID: Because it is Shapiro's extrapolation theory from his brilliant research.

dhw: Most scientific theories are extrapolations from research. If your buddies ignore the theory, that must be because they don’t know it, or they can’t argue against it.

DAVID: Or because it leads to nothing.

dhw: The theory that cells are intelligent leads to a completely different explanation of how evolution has taken place from Darwin’s theory and from the theory that every species has been individually designed by your God. Not exactly “nothing”, is it?

It has never explained how cells came to function so intelligently, based on natural events.


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum