More miscellany (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, July 23, 2024, 18:41 (121 days ago) @ dhw

Back to David’s theory of evolution

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

dhw: 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!

I never said we produce imperfect products by evolutionary designs!

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.

dhw: 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.

Yours is the contradiction. The 0.1% have to descend from the 99.9%. The process of Evolution must add up to 100% to follow Raup's analysis!

Symbiosis and theodicy

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?

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

So we would learn to use them. Brains don't come with instructions.

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.

dhw: 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?

Yes, they may follow God's instructions.