More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, August 09, 2024, 12:29 (104 days ago) @ David Turell

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

dhw: The Cambrian Gap is a real mystery, and there are theories which try to explain it! We have considered three: the fossil record is bound to be incomplete; cellular intelligence may be sufficiently advanced to make major jumps when conditions allow them; there is an unknown, sourceless mind which designed species “de novo”.

DAVID: Yes, there is a gap followed by enormous unexplained complexity. Nothing here is gradual. For more than 160+ years later, now with many deposits of Cambrian animals found all over the world, no new fossils of precursors! Only a designer fits.

dhw: “Gradual” is a relative term. The Cambrian period lasted for approx. 53.4 million years. That is an enormous period of time, allowing for millions of generations of intelligent cells to evolve millions of innovations, especially if your God had designed them to do so.

DAVID: Usefully forgetful: The Cambrian had a fixed beginning. Stick to that. I presented an article which defined the gap starting exactly at the beginning of the Cambrian era, about 400,000 years from the Ediacaran! 53.4 million years is all afterward!

I’m not sure what we’re discussing. I thought the Ediacaran ended when the Cambrian began (but please remind me what the 400,000 years refer to). The subject is speciation, and my reference was to the Cambrian period during which new species appeared, the “gap” being the lack of fossils between Ediacaran and Cambrian species . As far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong), after the initial explosion new species evolved throughout the Cambrian period in different stages. My (theistic) point is that instead of your God's “de novo” speciation, he could have given cell communities the ability to design their own novelties. That is the second of the three now bolded alternative explanations.

God’s imperfect system

dhw: In your vain quest to justify what you call your God’s imperfect, messy, inefficient way of achieving what you say is his purpose, you claimed that he had to design and then cull 99.9% of irrelevant species because of some obscure rule that all evolutions require culling.

DAVID: My claim is pure logic! Evolution means developing new forms in steps which leaves old forms behind! That is culling.

There’s a world of difference between species coming and going as conditions change (Raup says survival is a matter of luck), and an all-powerful, all-knowing designer deliberately creating species which he knows he will have to kill off because they are irrelevant to his purpose.

dhw: Why would he invent a rule for himself that demands the design and culling of 99.9% irrelevant species when he’s perfectly capable of direct, “de novo” creation (the Cambrian)? Your answer: because that’s how human evolutions work! By “trial and error”! And why do you reject such alternatives as experimentation to make new discoveries? Because that’s how humans work! Double standards, which are integral to your schizophrenic versions of your God.

DAVID: God created the evolution of life which we know as a history. If you tried to define evolution as you do in a biology class, you would get a fail.

I have defined evolution as “the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms”. If you attended a biology class and defined evolution as “the process by which an all-powerful, all-knowing God deliberately designs and has to cull 99.9 out of 100 species in order to design humans plus food”, I reckon you’d be invited to study a different subject.

99.9% versus 0.1%

DAVID: The culled 99.9% are the ancestors of the current living 0.1%, as a general summary of Raup's statistics.

dhw: Your insistence that the extinct 99.9% were all ancestors of the surviving 0.1% makes a mockery of the history of evolution as well as your own theory, which has him culling the 99.9% which were irrelevant to his one and only purpose.... And see above re “de novo” creation of our ancestors during the Cambrian, which means that no pre-Cambrian species were our ancestors!

DAVID: 99.9% + 0.1% = 100% of all that ever lived. The 99.9%c culled ancestors made the 0.1% surviving. Yes, or no?!

No. The “culled ancestors” were a minute section of the 100% of all creatures that ever lived, as illustrated by the dinosaur example, in which you thought 696 out of 700 non-avian dinosaurs instead of 4 avian dinosaurs were the ancestors of all current birds! You agreed that we and our food are NOT directly descended from 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived, but only from 0.1%. When will you stop contradicting yourself?

Origin of life

dhw: […] we are all in agreement. The origins of life remain a major mystery.

DAVID: That God did it is a reasonable theory.

dhw: Agreed, but it shifts the mystery to that of how a conscious, all-powerful mind can simply have “been” there forever, without a source.

DAVID: We have discussed the need for a first source. One exists, obviously. I accept the one that can think and design.

dhw: I know you do. Other people accept the chance theory. And others admit that they don’t know.

DAVID: OK.

LUCA

DAVID: Life requires a complex entity to achieve actual living. Such sudden appearance of life begs for a designer.

See above.