More miscellany Part One (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 13, 2024, 11:10 (100 days ago) @ David Turell

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

DAVID: How do cells invent brains or eyes? By design which involves the foresight of understanding the desired goal by then creating new non-existing types of cells.

dhw: Now you have switched from the time involved to the question that nobody can answer.I pointed out that if God could accomplish innovations in the time involved, then so could intelligent cells which he might have designed to do that very job.
dhw: […] Darwin wrote: “How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated” – and this may be said to sum up the whole process. ALL the innovations could have sprung from the original intelligence with which your God endowed the first cells, increasing in complexity as one innovation followed another, according to what was needed or allowed by changing conditions.

DAVID: Terrible thinking and invoking Darwin's avoidance of reasonable thought is senseless. How do blind cells know eyes are needed? For eyes to appear their need has to be envisioned in foresight!

Darwin was not dealing with origins. His point was that evolution gradually complexified – from a light sensitive nerve to the eye. Your question applies to every single innovation that has led from bacteria to us, and perhaps I should add to "what is needed or allowed by changing conditions", whatever might be advantageous in the struggle for survival. Over billions of years, every innovation that has led from bacteria to arthropods to humans would have provided some sort of advantage. You have no difficulty in accepting that the cell communities of which we humans are made can innovate without your God’s help. Why, then, do you insist that earlier cell communities could not have done the same – especially if they were designed by your God to do so?

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 […]. 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.

dhw: 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.
And:
dhw: New circumstances killed off 99.9%, and 0.1% were the survivors. Only the survivors could go on to “produce” descendants. You agreed, as bolded, and the dinosaur example illustrates the point. Please stop contradicting yourself.

DAVID: Weirdly your statement seems to agree with my view. Some parts of the 99.9% extinct produced todays 0.1%.

Weirdly, you simply keep changing your statements: 1) we and our food are descended from the 0.1% of survivors, and NOT from the 99.9%; 2) 99.9% of extinct life forms are our ancestors; 3) we and our food are descended from some of the 99.9%. Please stop prolonging the agony. As in 1): We and our food are descended from the 0.1% of survivors, and the 99.9% were NOT our ancestors. The exact percentage may be questionable, but the dinosaur example is an accurate reflection of the whole process: 696 of them were NOT our ancestors, and 4 of them were. This discussion should have ended when you first agreed with 1).