More "miscellany" PART TWO (General)

by dhw, Sunday, September 25, 2022, 08:47 (551 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

Whale changes

DAVID: […] The fact this all happened in a short period sure smells of design.

Ocean Giants | Going Aquatic: Cetacean Evolution | Nature | PBS
www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/ocean-giants-going-aquatic-cetacean-evolution/7577/

QUOTE: The earliest whales that we think were fully aquatic, that is, they never left the water, are found around 40 million years ago, during the middle Eocene That means that the transition from terrestrial animals to fully aquatic animals took about 12 million years.[/b] (dhw's bold)

dhw: I do not regard 12 million years as a short time, and I suggest that it allows ample time for intelligent cells to make the transitions. If, as you propose, your God performed operations on individual life forms, I wonder why it took him 12 million years to finish off the design which – being all-powerful and all-knowing – he presumably had in mind from the start.

DAVID: You totally missed the point. All aquatic mammals left land at the same time interval. As if all designed at once. As for the time period, I've demonstrated God evolves all of His creations. Evolution takes time.

If it took about 12 million years for the transition from terrestrial animals to fully aquatic animals (and remember the changes were not the same for all of them), then what time is “the same time”? (And what is a "time interval"?) Did your God operate on every relevant land mammal on the same day? I believe there were some scientists before you who demonstrated that all creatures evolved, but I don’t know how you can demonstrate that God did it. However, if he exists, like you I have absolutely no idea why he would need to spend millions of years designing stage after stage of every organism that ever lived when (a) he is apparently capable of producing species with no precursors (Cambrian), and (b) the only organisms he apparently wanted to produce were us and our food.

Loss of genes

DAVID: I just like seeing Behe supported.

You claimed that Behe thought loss of genes led to speciation. This turned out to be wrong. Eventually, we reached agreement. And I’m glad you now accept my commonsense explanation of gene loss, as confirmed in the article.

Viruses sense when to attack

QUOTE: "The key takeaway from this research is that "the virus is using cellular intel to make decisions," Erill says, "and if it's happening in bacteria, it's almost certainly happening in plants and animals, because if it's an evolutionary strategy that makes sense, evolution will discover it and exploit it.'"

DAVID: all biological action /communication at the cellular level is the same. Just as viruses sense certain proteins, and take action, our organ's cells sense proteins and take action. This is cellular communication in action and how it works.

Using intelligence to process information, communicate and take decisions is indeed a strategy that would explain not only viral attacks on bacteria, and cellular defences against viruses, but also the whole of evolution, as intelligent cell communities adjust themselves to cope with or in some cases exploit new requirements.

Ethan Siegal's non-answer:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/why-does-nature-obey-laws/?utm_source=mailchimp...

QUOTE: "Yes, the structures that they bind together to form change; the conditions under which they exist and interplay with one another change; the various phenomena that emerge from their interactions change. The various complex systems that come into existence are chaotic enough that, in all the Universe, no two are ever truly identical."

All of this could be applied to cells and cell communities and the higgledy-piggledy, ever changing bush of life – right down to the fact that no two individual organisms are ever truly identical.

QUOTES: “Imagine that one of these particles ceased to exist and that either no new particle came to replace it or that one or more novel particles that don’t presently exist came to exist in its stead.”
"What would be the consequence of that?
"The answer, like it or not, is that everything that exists in the Universe, as we know it, would fundamentally cease to exist, and would be replaced with something new.
"

DAVID: He goes on to tell us how it all has to work together in a wonderful exposé of quantum particle physics. But the underlying 'why' is never answered, Fine tuning is never mentioned. The reason why is it has to be this way is to have life appear. It must be exactly like this as a purposeful design for life. It must have been designed!!!

Clearly all these particles can produce an almost infinite variety of forms. “Something new” means a DIFFERENT universe, and there is no reason to suppose that a DIFFERENT universe could not also produce an almost infinite variety of forms, and these could lead to DIFFERENT forms of life.


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