More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 23, 2024, 09:36 (121 days ago) @ David Turell

Back to David’s theory of evolution

dhw: My point was that we only know of one evolution of life. It’s you who insisted on comparing your God’s evolution to human forms, thereby suddenly embracing the “humanization” that makes you reject all alternatives to your illogical theory. As above, you have tried to make your omniscient, omnipotent God into a reflection of human fallibility!

DAVID: Just the opposite. Evolutionary processes as an own subject is fully understood by most folks.

And so you believe that your unique, omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God is just like all the human creators who followed him, and he and they produce imperfect, inefficient designs by trial and error, although he certainly isn’t human in any sense. Meanwhile, your schizophrenic self accuses me of humanizing your God!

Biochemical controls (99.9% versus 0.1%).

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

dhw: But now you believe that we are descended from organisms that had no descendants!

DAVID: The 0.1% descended from the 99.9%!!!

dhw: Why do you keep repeating this absurd statement which you have already rejected? How can humans plus food be descended from all the creatures that had no descendants???

DAVID: The eliminated are the ancestors of the living, yes or no.

No, as you agreed above in bold. The 99.9% of extinct species will certainly include some of the ancestors of current species, but those ancestors would have been part of the 0.1% that did have descendants. For example: 696 species of dinosaur had no modern descendants. Only four species survived – possibly as modern birds, or possibly as now extinct bird species that evolved into modern birds. The key figure is the 696 dinosaurs that went extinct and had no descendants. Forget the precise figures: modern species evolved from only 4 out of 700 species of dinosaur. And so the “eliminated” or “extinct” or “culled” species were not the ancestors of us and our food, because we and our food – as you agreed – descended only from the survivors, which you pinpoint as the 0.1%. Please stop contradicting yourself.

Symbiosis and theodicy

DAVID: [...]The exactly required bacteria to fill the need must arrive. How does that exact solution happen? Not by chance!! A designer is required to bring the plant and bacteria to be together. From a theodicy viewpoint this is a good bacterial infection!!

dhw: Nobody would question the good that is done by bacteria. The problem is the bad, which your all-powerful, all-knowing God knew would happen but lacked the power and knowledge to prevent, or which he actually wanted.

DAVID: Knowing there would be problems, He gave us the brain power to solve them.

dhw: Why would an all-good, omnipotent, omniscient God create problems of evil? If he was omniscient, clearly he knew how to solve them, and so your answer was that he wanted to challenge us. Why do you think he would want to challenge us?

DAVID: To test the brains He gave us?

A test is a challenge. Why do you think he wanted to test our brains?

killfish

QUOTE: "It has long been observed that organisms modify their traits, including reproductive patterns, in response to changes in their environment. This type of evolutionary plasticity has been observed in many types of animals in different habitats and with varying predators.”

DAVID: quick adjustments are well known in Resnick's guppy studies. More than likely these instincts are designed. How would early forms have survived without this adaptation? How quickly does a species learn a lesson to survive? Very quickly is my guess.

dhw: How could an organism adapt “instinctively” to conditions it has never encountered before? “More than likely” is that if environmental conditions are new, and species are quick to learn a lesson, their response is not instinctive but is the result of intelligent processing of new information, and intelligent decision-making on how best to handle it.

DAVID: If killifish can analyze that quickly. They must deal with conceptualization in tiny brains.

Yes of course they must be able to process the information and work out how to handle it. I don’t know why you think “conceptualization” somehow disqualifies them from being able to do so. Unthinking, automatic instinct requires no thought-processing or decision-making. Why would the absence of such abilities be more likely to come up with solutions? Or are you back with your 3.8 billion-year-old book of instructions for every solution to every problem, or your God popping in to teach organisms the solution every time they have a problem?