More miscellany Part One (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, August 11, 2024, 11:10 (36 days ago) @ David Turell

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: The rocks show a transition timed period between Ediacaran and Cambrian. In that period is the phenotypical gap we agree upon. That speciation went on all during the Cambrian after the gap is beside the point. It doesn't defuse the Gap. That time period is too short for such changes to have happened naturally (chance mutation).

I am not defending chance mutation. I am pointing out that if (possibly God-given) intelligent cells produced the innovations, the time factor becomes as irrelevant as it is if you opt for God doing the job himself.

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.

DAVID: Not irrelevant. They create the diversity needed for today's human supporting ecosystems.

No they don’t. You have agreed that only 0.1% of all the creatures that ever lived were the ancestors of those that are alive today. (See below)

dhw: (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: I did not humanize God's evolution. I compared it to human evolutionary processes in design to try to refute your nutty approach to Raup's statistics.

For your nutty theistic distortion of Raup’s statistics, see the “evolution” thread. You tried to prove that God’s invention of evolution was subject to the same rule whereby human inventors proceed through a system of trial and error. And yet at the same time, your God is perfectly capable of designing species “de novo”. Your Mr Hyde allows you to “humanize” if you want to, and then to dismiss alternatives because they “humanize”. Hence your double standards (matching your schizophrenia).

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!!!

dhw: “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.

DAVID: You defined culling in a nice way. But, the same result appeared.

Culling is not a “nice” way. It means deliberate killing. My alternatives do not require the imperfect inefficiency you impose on your schizophrenically perfect, efficient |God.

99.9% versus 0.1%

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: But indirectly from the 99.9% who went extinct.

How can 696 dinosaur species which had no descendants nevertheless have been indirect ancestors of current life forms? Only 4 species of dinosaur have current descendants. This discussion should have ended with your bolded agreement.