More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 06, 2024, 08:43 (107 days ago) @ David Turell

God’s imperfect system.

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

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

DAVID: Your God has no resemblance to mine. You are trying to make my God human. You can't. No double standards. I fully reject yours.

You tried to explain the imperfection of your God’s method of evolution by telling us that all evolutions require a process of “culling” as shown by human “trial and error”. It was you who equated your God’s method with human methods, and yet you constantly reject my alternative theories because they “humanize” your God. Double standards.

Biochemical controls (99.9% versus 0.1%).

DAVID: We are part of the 0.1% surviving.

Correct.

DAVID: The 99.9% are the ancestors of the living. 100%, simple.

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 0.1% surviving.

In case you haven‘t understood yourself, that means that 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived were NOT the ancestors of the living.

QUOTE: Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth….life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began.

DAVID: 696 dinosaurs became over 10,000 bird species!!!!

dhw: LIFE FOR NON AVIAN DINOSAURS ENDED. Those were the 696 species. Only 4 species of avian dinosaurs evolved into 10,000 bird species. Your schizophrenic self is now trying to turn mathematics on its head. Please take a grip.

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.

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

DAVID: Yes, a dumb God who doesn't know what He is doing. Downgrading God as usual.

It is usually you who downgrade God by ridiculing his method of evolution as messy and inefficient. If life kept appearing and disappearing because early Earth was not really ready for it to survive, how does that come to mean that your God was in perfect control of a perfect method?

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”

dhw: 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?

DAVID: God is not inefficient, His evolutionary method appears to be. Quite a difference in interpretation from a so-called balanced agnostic!

It is YOU who keep ridiculing it as inefficient, because you insist on burdening him with your version of his purpose (us and our contemporaries) and a method which produced and demanded the culling of 99.9% of species that were irrelevant to his purpose. The free-for-all and experimentation theories would both explain the comings and goings without the ridicule.

Plant intelligence

QUOTES: If we begin with the presumption that ‘intelligence’ is an exclusive feature of animal behaviour and that it requires a brain and a central nervous system, or that it is a kind a quantifiable property or capacity of organisms with brains and central nervous systems, then of course we will dismiss the idea of plant intelligence. Advocates of plant intelligence are on strong ground, though, in denying that that presumption has any warrant.

Trewavas accordingly defines plant intelligence as ‘adaptively variable behaviour during the lifetime of the individual’.

All the arguments in favour of plant intelligence apply to cellular intelligence as well. According to Shapiro: “Living cells and organisms are cognitive (sentient) entities that act and interact purposefully to ensure survival, growth and proliferation.” Clearly his theory is gaining ground.

Origin of life

QUOTE: "The origins of life remain a major mystery. How were complex molecules able to form and remain intact for prolonged periods without disintegrating?”

DAVID: Same old, same old. All of this work starts with preformed molecules off the shelf. It thus completely bypasses the ultimate question how did any biochemical molecules form on a hot rocky planet?

Yep, we are all in agreement. The origins of life remain a major mystery.

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