More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Monday, November 14, 2022, 08:41 (500 days ago) @ David Turell

Toxoplasma

dhw: SOME of what was past became us, and the rest did not. It is the rest that you cannot explain. Nothing to do with “eras” (though you love the dicing and splicing into Ediacaran and Cambrian) but everything to do with your illogical theory that the dead ends were necessary for us and our food, although they were only necessary for the life forms that existed at the time.

DAVID: Which makes my point!!

dhw: Wonderful! Until now you have claimed that the dead ends were necessary for your God to achieve his one and only purpose of designing us and our food. Now that you agree the dead ends were only necessary for the life forms that existed at the time, and therefore were not necessary for us and our food, we can at last forget your illogical theory. Another red letter in the history of the AgnosticWeb!

DAVID: Yikes!! You have flipped history. Evolution is a series of related times and events that flows along from simple to complex. You've taken your intellectual scalpel and sliced it all up into unrelated events, no longer evolution.

Same old dodge. All life forms except the very first are believed to have descended from earlier life forms. Evolution is the continuous history of life forms coming and going. But in the course of that history, most life forms died out and did not lead to new life forms. As usual, you prefer to edit this fact out of your comments, because it makes nonsense of your theory that right from the start your God designed every life form as a necessity required for the design of us and our food.

Octopus brain

dhw: One final clarification: is it, then, the germ cells which decide on the changes (or in your theory carry your God’s instructions for the changes), and they pass instructions to the stem cells to make the changes?

DAVID: Yes Germ cell DNA becomes stem cell DNA

Thank you.

Pete the opossum

DAVID: The fact that you easily understand the playing opossum concept doesn't mean it is a tiny concept readily available to Pete's brain.

dhw: I have sufficient respect for our fellow animals to assume that they can learn from experience, and can pass on what they have learned, and can even work out solutions to problems and devise ways of improving their chances of survival. “Ant farming” gave us another example. Your amazing catalogue of natural wonders is a constant reminder of their abilities, and I do find it very hard to imagine that every wonder has been individually designed by your God, let alone designed solely for our benefit.

DAVID: Your God doesn't want to help us.

I don’t know what this comment has to do with the intelligence of our fellow creatures, but it’s very significant. Even your beloved Adler puts your God’s interest in us at 50/50. You, on the other hand, who regard enjoyment, interest, experimentation, new ideas etc. as too “humanized” to be acceptable, think that he would help us if we were threatened by an asteroid. How astonishingly human and humane of him!

Cornelius Hunter

QUOTE: So, what is evolution? In other words, what is core to the theory — and not forfeitable? It’s naturalism. Period. That is the only thing required of evolutionary theory. And naturalism is a religious requirement, not a scientific one.

Without a definition of naturalism, this seems to me to be totally meaningless. Quite apart from the ethical and aesthetic uses of the term, it can mean "the belief that all religious truth is based not on revelation but rather on the study of natural causes and processes”. However, in philosophy it is “a scientific account of the world in term of causes and natural forces that rejects all spiritual, supernatural, or teleological explanations.” (So in what sense is it a religious requirement?) How on earth either of these definitions (Encarta) can be regarded as the core of evolutionary theory is beyond me. I would suggest that the “core “ of evolutionary theory is the belief that evolution is “the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms” (Penguin Dictionary of Science).

QUOTE: There is no such thing as a settled theory of evolution. On that point, textbook orthodoxy is simply false.

I agree with the first sentence. Even Darwin’s theory is a collection of theories, parts of which are widely disputed (e.g. the central role of random mutations, and the rigid adherence to gradualism). But I don’t know what he means by “textbook orthodoxy”. Who decides what is “orthodox”? The very fact that nobody has yet solved the mystery of HOW organisms speciate, let alone how the mechanisms came into existence, has led to different approaches. But the “core” remains the same, as defined above.


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