More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 30, 2024, 11:08 (48 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I never said we produce imperfect products by evolutionary designs!

dhw: You have said your God’s designs are imperfect and inefficient, and “culling” is part of any evolution, citing human inventions as your example. “Much is trial and error […].”
A glaring example of “humanization” which you used in order to demonstrate that your God’s inefficiency was due to some obscure rule governing all evolutions.

DAVID: Evolving anything follows one rule: improvement in design over several steps.

That does not mean your perfect, first-cause God invented an imperfect method which required a 99.9% failure rate of “trial and error”. You moan that I “humanize” God, and here you equate your God’s method of evolution with the inefficient trial and error method used by humans.

DAVID: If God chose it, it was the proper way to do it.

dhw: So the “proper” way was imperfect, cumbersome, messy and inefficient because your God is schizophrenic.

DAVID: Your usual distortions: I am schizophrenic about God, which cannot/won't make God schizophrenic.

If you believe he is perfect but imperfect, then you believe he is schizophrenic.

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: You continue to ignore this agreement! Why?

DAVID: The 0.1% have to descend from the 99.9%. The process of Evolution must add up to 100%. […] The 0.1% are living now […]. Your nutty math: 99.9% gone + 0.1% surviving as ancestors + 0.1% now living =s 100.1%.

dhw: Once more: the 99.9% (approx.) of extinct species INCLUDE our extinct ancestors. The 0.1% are the modern survivors, some of whose ancestors are extinct. For example, out of 696 dinosaur species, only 4 either left descendants or have actually survived themselves (e.g. perhaps ostriches, emus and kiwis). Let’s say two are extinct, and two have survived. The two survivors and the two with extinct ancestors make up the 0.1% of present species that are linked to past. That means current species have survived or evolved from 0.57% of those that once lived [...] The current 0.1% are NOT descended from the 99.9% that ever lived, but only from the 0.1% of survivors, as you have agreed.

DAVID: Same nutty math. All living now are survivors: 0.1%. They are direct descendants of the 99.9% dying in the past. 100%.

99.9% of creatures who you say were NOT our ancestors plus 0.1% who were our ancestors or who still exist = 100%, as you agreed in bold. Why do you continue to contradict yourself?

Symbiosis and theodicy

dhw: I’d have thought anyone who believes in a God who wanted to create us, would also want to know why. You suggested the above reasons/guesses. Any other human attributes you think might have driven him?

DAVID: Human attributes do not drive God!

That is your Mr Hyde contradicting your Dr Jekyll, who says God must enjoy creating, may want us to recognize and worship him, may care for us, and probably/possibly has human attributes. You have confessed that you are schizophrenic. That does not make for rational discussion.

The role of dGRNs
dhw: The article presents the case for ID against chance mutations. We have agreed on this for the last 16 years. The article makes no mention of ID via Shapiro’s perhaps God-given cellular intelligence. Why not?

DAVID: ID sees no evidence of Shapiro's theory.

I’m criticizing the article. The term “intelligent design” can hardly mean one should ignore the possibility that your God designed intelligent cells to do their own designing.

How children pick up a language

QUOTE: How much of their communication do babies owe to nature versus nurture?

dhw: In my view, the above question rightly casts doubt on the rest of the article. Feral children don’t “speak” the language of their human mothers, or make sounds heard in the womb. They may even be unable to form those sounds. Our languages would have evolved from the sounds made by our fellow mammals, and our vocal apparatus has come from those ancestors who laid the foundations of our human languages, but our vocabulary and syntax have to be learned from the beginning. Babies do not emerge from the womb with a single word, let alone a sentence.

DAVID: Babies come built to pick up language.

All forms of life are born with a variety of abilities, which include their particular means of communication. Then they learn how to use those means.

Attention structures

QUOTE: Words like 'this' and 'that' or 'here' and 'there' occur in all languages. In a study published in PNAS, researchers from Yale University and the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics (MPI) in Nijmegen show that such 'demonstrative' words are used to direct listeners' focus of attention and to establish joint attention.

I’m applying for a grant to study the extent to which languages use nouns to indicate objects, adjectives to describe those objects, personal pronouns to indicate which person is being referred to, verbs to indicate actions and states, tenses of verbs to indicate the time of the action or state etc. All contributions will be welcome.