More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, June 28, 2024, 13:15 (71 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God is not human in any way. Any emotional attributes must be applied allegorically. Your tired distortion of God's use of evolution has been answered.

There you go again. Your teacher Adler is neutral on the subject of God’s personality, whereas you are certain that your God has no human attributes. And to hell with all those theologians who are certain, for instance, that God loves us and wants us to worship him.

God’s “challenge”

dhw: ...And what might have been his purpose for challenging us?

DAVID: I assume to make life more interesting.

Interesting for us or for him? You are still lumbered with your theory that your all-powerful, all-knowing God knowingly created ways in which to make us suffer. Hardly commensurate with your vision of an all-good God. And do you really believe that we would find life less interesting without the pain and misery your God deliberately created for us?

Giraffes

DAVID: I think giraffes were a goal-directed design bit by bit even if in spurts.

dhw: And other people would argue that giraffes evolved naturally bit by bit in spurts, and if there was a God whose goal was to design giraffes (because, apparently he could not have designed humans plus our food without giraffes), why would he specially design them in so many stops and starts, since he was perfectly capable of designing species “de novo”?

DAVID: God's choice, for His unknown reasons we cannot know.

Since we cannot know his reasons, how do you know that his reason for designing non- giraffes was to design giraffes bit by bit in spurts, and that his reason for designing giraffes was that bit by bit he wanted to design us and our food in spurts, although he could have designed and actually did design whatever he liked “de novo”?

Proper delivery of proteins

Cells constantly produce proteins with controlled delivery:

DAVID: this article raises the usual question. How does a blind natural process find exact protein components? What is more likely is a designer at work.

dhw: […] None of the processes that have evolved over billions of years are “blind” – they are all the consequence of cells responding to different requirements. The great mystery is the origin of life in the form of cells which can not only reproduce but can also make changes to themselves. I agree that these miraculous abilities provide a good case for a designer.

DAVID: Thank you.

dhw: I hope your thank you covers all of the above!

DAVID: Just for the designer. See entry today on origin of life.

Theoretical origin of life: Need for repair

QUOTE: Belief that simpler “proto-cells” didn’t require repair mechanisms requires blind faith, set against the prevailing scientific evidence." (David’s bold)

DAVID: as I have shown here in the past all of OOL research is based on blind faith that life can appear naturally.

I agree. This is the case against atheism. Just as it requires blind faith to believe in the existence of a supreme, unknown and unknowable form of conscious mind that created the universe and the cell, and has simply existed for ever, without any source. Hence agnosticism. (dhw’s bold).

Social adaptability in macaques

xeno: What this study directly assaults is the idea that macaques are automatons that react via instinct. They think like we do, sans language. (dhw's bold)

DAVID: I agree this was a thoughtful decision.

dhw: I agree completely. And I would extend the bolded comment to all organisms, though with the obvious proviso that our own human range of thought goes way, way, way beyond the limits of other life forms.

DAVID: I agree.

dhw: An important agreement in the light of our discussions on intelligence, and on the growing belief in the theory of cellular intelligence.

DAVID: They act intelligently. It can be soley from DNA directions.

I’m happy with your now more open approach: it “can be” is a far cry from your earlier 100% opposition to the theory.

Bipedalism

DAVID: There must have been a time when communication was 'sign' hand gestures and proto words. That sufficed in exploring the Earth, driven by our intelligence which arrived long before language. When considering natural evolution, as dhw does, what caused such a complex brain to appear? Our ape cousins survived easily without it. Bipedalism preceded the brain and can be said to drive the brain's development, but what caused bipedalism? This is why design is so appealing. Natural development does not make sense.

I’ve shifted this from the thread on the importance of human language, as it’s a different subject which in fact we’ve already covered. The theory we discussed before was that local environmental conditions caused a group of tree-dwellers to seek survival at ground level – just as a group of pre-whales might have been forced by conditions to seek survival in the water. Bipedalism proved to be advantageous by freeing up the arms and hands, offering greater visibility, and as we know from so many modern experiments, new activities result in complexification of the brain. Your own theory, if I remember rightly, was that your God performed all the necessary operations on some tree-dwellers and told them to go and live on the ground.