Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 27, 2022, 17:05 (725 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I bring up human examples of dead ends to try and empty your head of worry about dead ends in any form of evolution, and back you bounce to worry about God's form of evolution. All dead ends are of equal importance as examples of how any form evolution works!

dhw: So your God specially designed countless forms of life that had no connection with those that he wanted to design, because dead ends are important to show that evolution works by repeatedly failing to design what you want to design. I hope your all-powerful God knows what you are talking about.

DAVID: More tortured twists invented about evolution. In our case, simple became complex and many simple organisms disappeared. But many remain to form the ecosystems that feed us. A perfect example is dinosaurs becoming our birds. God knew how to evolve us. You don't understand my God.

dhw: Your usual blatant dodge. What you have written is spot on: we and our current ecosystems are descended from those forms of life that were not dead ends. But what you have left out of your account is the question why your God “needed” to design all the dead ends which had no connection with us and our food. Your absurd explanation in the comment at the head of this post is that your God designed them to show that evolution works by designing failures, which you even repeat as follows:

DAVID: All forms of evolution may have dead ends while working from start to end. I used human to help you see the need for dead ends. Direct creation solves the dead-end problem, as you have noted.

dhw: What “need” for dead ends? Even on a human level, do you think every inventor, philosopher, scientist says to him/herself: “I need to fail before I succeed”? Do you really believe that your God said the same thing when – as you claim – he started out with the one and only goal of designing us and our food? “I need to design failures so that humans will know how important it is to fail before they succeed.” Of course direct creation would solve the problem! The problem is the fact that according to your theory, your God did NOT directly create what he wanted to create, but created failures! (See also “Viruses fight bat immunity” etc.)

Of course dead ends can be considered failures, but evolutions advance from failed experiments in form and function and then new attempts at success. Dinosaurs disappeared but gave us birds. But as always you ignore that God produced everything we know about, and if God created it He felt it was required to appear.

dhw: (referring to the Cambrian): If you believe there is a continuous line of descent from Archaea to us plus food, it makes no sense to state that we plus food are descended from life forms that had no predecessors!

DAVID: A designer can create any gaps He wishes in phenotypes, but not in the biochemistry of living. Only advances in biochemistry permit advances in phenotypes. True evolutionary continuity is in advancing biochemistry, never phenotype.

dhw: ALL phenotypes evolve into different phenotypes through changes in the biochemistry.
You seem to be saying that speciation is irrelevant to the concept of common descent.

DAVID: No, the level of developed biochemistry of life permits the design of a new more advanced species from old. Still speciation. Allows for gaps in forms from a continuous process, the complexification of living biochemistry.

dhw: What permits speciation is the flexibility of the biochemistry of life. The theory of common descent, which you claim to believe in, is not based on the fact that all speciation entails changes in the biochemistry! Common descent consists in the “forms” that develop from earlier forms.

It is time to forget Darwin and his ancient form of common descent. Modern work on relationships is done at the genome level, which at times finds surprising relationships contrary to analysis from form.

dhw: And in your theory, the only “forms” we humans plus our food are descended from are those which your God created without predecessors. This breaks the continuity of common descent,

Same answer given above. Genome trees are not Darwin's tree.

dhw: thereby invalidating the theory that we plus our food are descended from Archaea and pre-Cambrian “forms”. (NB I myself do believe in a continuous line of descent from bacteria to us. Yes, the Cambrian is an unsolved mystery, but that does not remove the blatant contradiction between your two theories.)

The contradiction is your 170-year-old thinking.