More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, August 02, 2024, 12:18 (111 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: 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: God chose His perfect system. Only humans criticize as I do. Your same human-God levels problem in understanding.

You have completely ignored the point. According to you, your perfect God’s system is imperfect, in line with human inventions, which evolve via trial and error. But you criticize my alternatives on the grounds that they “humanize” your God!!! Double standards.

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.

But for some reason, you now insist that the 99.9% are our ancestors!

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%.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Your math is not 100%: 99.9% extinct ancestors, 0.1% surviving and us 0.1% living= 100.1%.

Thus is getting sillier and sillier. If we accept Raup’s figures, 99.9% of all species are extinct. These would INCLUDE the extinct ancestors of the current living 0.1%. Our extinct ancestors would have survived earlier extinctions, because otherwise there would have been no direct line between them and us. You quite rightly agreed that these “survivors” would also have been part of “the 0.1% surviving”. 99.9% extinct, including our extinct ancestors, plus 0.1% surviving in the present = 100%. What else could you have meant by your agreement that we are NOT directly descended from the 99.9%? Now look at your next blunder:

Evolution statistics
QUOTE: Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began.

DAVID: Redo your evolutionary math: 696 dinosaurs became over 10,000 bird species!!! Raup is an overall view of a whole process. Stop slicing it up.

Please stop this nonsense. LIFE FOR NON AVIAN DINOSAURS ENDED. Those were the 696 species. Only 4 species of avian dinosaurs evolved into 10,000 bird species.

Symbiosis and theodicy

This merely repeats David’s schizophrenic insistence that his God is not human in any way but may have human attributes which would make him human in some ways.

Earliest L-forms

DAVID: it is clear life appeared very early on Earth; despite the fact the early Earth was not really prepared for life to survive. This suggests to me a designer God pushing life development ahead as fast as He could.

It suggests to me that if there is a designer, he was experimenting, and learning as he went along.

Origin of life

QUOTE: "In fact, complex life might have arisen several times over the millennia, as has been suggested by other studies. Scientists are still working to pin down which types of life evolved when, and there's no guarantee that all evolutionary jumps would've stuck”

Same again: a free-for-all, depending on the environment? Or a possible God possibly experimenting - or being appallingly inefficient, as in David’s theory?