More miscellany Part One (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, August 10, 2024, 08:25 (103 days ago) @ David Turell

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

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!

dhw: 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

DAVID: The periods are layers of rock. The Ediacaran/Cambrian gap in rock is sharp, as seen in the Grand Canyon. The real gap is the last Ediacarans are simple fronds and the Cambrians are fully formed animals.

Yes, that is the gap I was referring to. What is the 400,000-year gap? And do you agree that speciation continued to take place all through the Cambrian period?

dhw: 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. [See yesterday’s post.]

DAVID: Back to your wishful Shapiro theory. No one knows how speciation might work.

It is no more “wishful” than your God theory, and you are correct. Nobody knows, and that is why we have different theories.

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.

dhw: 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.

(I notice that you have completely dodged the issue of your double standards, as you try to "humanize" your God's inefficient system of evolution.)

DAVID: But that is the true history. Your distortion is everything was relevant to His purpose.

Nobody knows the “true history”! The existence of God, the single purpose, and the imperfect, messy, inefficient method of achieving that purpose are ALL part of your theory.

DAVID: If you tried to define evolution as you do in a biology class, you would get a fail.

dhw: I have defined evolution as “the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms”.

DAVID: And how did they develop unless their ancestors went extinct, i.e., culled!!!

“Cull” = deliberate killing. Progressive innovations made the now extinct ancestors redundant. A free-for-all would not involve deliberately designed mistakes that must be deliberately killed. And divine experimentation for the sake of making new discoveries would not require your God knowingly to make mistakes and to have to rectify them in the imperfect, inefficient manner you impose on him.

99.9% versus 0.1%

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?!

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Raup shows that what is living today is .01% of everything that ever lived.

0.1% (not .01%) is generally accepted, though it’s a bit hard to accept quite such a precise figure.

DAVID: 99.9% are their ancestors. No contradiction of my view.

You simply keep repeating this, although you have explicitly disagreed with yourself***, as well as offering a totally absurd misinterpretation of the dinosaur example.as above. The ancestors of current species came from the 0.1% of species that continued to survive extinction until they eventually evolved into the current 0.1% of all that ever lived. Please stop contradicting yourself.

*** 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.