More Miscellany: Bechly reappears (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 04, 2024, 21:43 (21 days ago) @ dhw

The brain: studies on memory

DAVID: No agreement. The brain's ability for plasticity is designed by God.

dhw: The expressions you used were the ability to “run the show” and to “take its own decisions”. I agree that this requires plasticity. How does this come to mean that he did NOT design the brain’s autonomous ability to run the show and take decisions?

God designed the brains' plasticity which mimics autonomy.

Moths fake out bats

DAVID: You are stuck outside of theism. Of course, God thought evolution was the perfect way to create us. Our human opinion is it looks cumbersome to us. No matter how much you try, you can't outthink God.

dhw: You are stuck with a human view of theism that insults your God, and with the blinkered attitude that no other view of theism is of any consequence to you. No matter how hard you try, you cannot find a single reason why your omniscient, omnipotent God would choose an imperfect and inefficient way to achieve the single purpose you allow him to have (us and our food). I am not trying to outthink your God. I am presuming that if he exists, his actions would logically and efficiently fulfil his purpose.

DAVID: The bold is correct. God chose to evolve us as the best way to do it.

dhw: But you’ve forgotten that he also chose to evolve (by which you mean design) and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us plus our food. So your omnipotent and omniscient God had to use an imperfect, inefficient way to do what he chose to do. And this makes sense to you, though you cannot find a single reason why he would act in such a way.

See other thread. Adler says we cannot ever know God's reasons and it is not wise to try.

New stromatolites

QUOTE: That oxygen initially wiped out stromatolites' competition, enabling their prominence in the Archean and early Proterozoic environment. However, as more life forms adapted their metabolism to an oxygenated atmosphere, stromatolites started to decline, popping up in the geologic record only after mass extinctions or in difficult environments.

DAVID: I had thought stromatolites were all fossils. That there living ones as a remnant of the distant past shows how tough they are.

dhw: And it shows precisely how Raup’s view of evolution works: species come and go, depending on their ability to respond to changing conditions. All by luck, as opposed to design.

DAVID: God may design the bad luck scenarios.

dhw: Yes indeed. That would mean he designed the scenarios for a free-for-all. Scenarios for luck do not fit in with an omnipotent, omniscient God in pursuit of a single purpose!

Not luck if by design.

Examples of Darwinist thinking: Insect adaptations

QUOTE: "Evolution is often thought of as a haphazard process acting on an assortment of traits that randomly appear through genetic variation.”

QUOTE: "Our results imply that evolution is both repeatable and complex for the same trait," Nosil and colleagues write in their published paper. (David’s bold)

DAVID: this is the usual Darwin-speak propaganda. The bold is absolutely on point. The insects have a built-in set of adaptions to fit the circumstances of their environment. The headline calling it evolution is totally overblown. Science writers Have this slant built into their thought patterns. Why? Current science is tearing down pure Darwinism.

dhw: But it’s not “Darwin-speak”. The first quote emphasizes the randomness of Darwin’s theory, whereas the article emphasizes the fact that repeated conditions will trigger the same responses, much like convergent evolution. What would originally have been an innovation in response to new conditions is repeated when similar conditions arise. There is no randomness - and in this context I would say the article contradicts that part of Darwin’s theory (as you and I do, too.)

DAVID: See my now bolded. The headline is Darwin-speak! that was my point. The article itself is critical of Darwin.

dhw: I’d have thought that convergent evolution and repetition of features that enable species to deal with the same environmental conditions are a part of the evolutionary process. The headline is: “Astonishing study shows evolution really does repeat itself”. How does this = “totally overblown” Darwin-speak propaganda, when the study actually runs counter to Darwin’s theory of randomness? Your hatred of Darwin is verging on the paranoid!

My hatred is of total misuse of Darwin.