More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, August 18, 2024, 10:35 (95 days ago) @ David Turell

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

dhw: We have long since agreed that he [Darwin] was wrong to insist that nature never “jumps”, although there is no doubt that much of evolution was a gradual process, as organs and organisms complexified. The eye and the brain are good examples.

DAVID: The eye and brain are not good examples. Cambrian eyes are really de novo as are their brains.

dhw: Even that is questionable, but I'm referring to the gradual development of eyes and brains from the first “primitive” forms to those of today.

DAVID: Yikes!!! Show me one early eye form in the Ediacaran? Well!

Organs/organisms continued to evolve DURING the Cambrian. Anyway. Have a look at this:
Evolution of the eye | New Scientist

New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com › definition › evolution-o...

"The key to the puzzle, Darwin said, was to find eyes of intermediate complexity in the animal kingdom that would demonstrate a possible path from simple to sophisticated.
Those intermediate forms have now been found. According to evolutionary biologists, it would have taken less than half a million years for the most rudimentary eye to evolve into a complex “camera” eye like ours.
The first step is to evolve light-sensitive cells. This appears to be a trivial matter. Many single-celled organisms have eyespots made of light-sensitive pigments. Some can even swim towards or away from light. Such rudimentary light-sensing abilities confer an obvious survival advantage.
The next step was for multicellular organisms to concentrate their light-sensitive cells into a single location. Patches of photosensitive cells were probably common long before the Cambrian, allowing early animals to detect light and sense what direction it was coming from. Such rudimentary visual organs are still used by jellyfish and flatworms and other primitive groups, and are clearly better than nothing."

99.9% versus 0.1%

DAVID: The Raup numbers are overall statistics for all of evolution lumped together. Stop over-interpreting them.

It is you who overinterpreted them by insisting that your God HAD to design and cull the irrelevant 99.9% in order to “produce” the 0.1%. You have agreed that the 99.9% did NOT produce the current 0.1%, because species that had no descendants can’t have produced descendants!!! For example, only 4 out of 700 dinosaurs produced ancestors of current species. The 696 were therefore irrelevant to your version of your God’s purpose. Hence your ridicule of his method as “imperfect” and “inefficient”, though you refuse to accept that your theory might be wrong.

Insect gap

DAVID: […] All of ID theory is information must be supplied from outside the system. Your obvious lack of understanding how complex living biochemistry happened to be causes your attitude.

dhw: ID has become synonymous with the notion of God the designer, and so of course he is outside the system he created. But whether he exists or not, if intelligent cells do their own designing, then the designing will have been done from inside the system. Your prejudice against Shapiro’s theory and your adherence to your own schizophrenic beliefs “cause your attitude”.

DAVID: Yes, I have attitude. Shapiro's theory is pure conjecture based on what bacteria can do, which system is not carried on now.

There is no new speciation at the moment. We are going through a period of stasis. Meanwhile, David Turell’s theory is pure conjecture based on his wishes: “First I choose a God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.”

Plant controls (now “cellular intelligence”)

dhw: Whether that intelligence is powerful enough IN SOME SPECIES to allow for further speciation is a moot point, but that is why I say you are on the verge of accepting Shapiro’s theory. Acknowledgement of intelligence is a very big step in that direction. So too is acknowledgement that there are different degrees of intelligence. Some cell communities cannot go beyond devising means of survival. Comparatively few will be able to innovate. We can see an analogy in humans: not many of us have creative, innovative intelligence. But it only takes a few to create whole new industries/species.

DAVID: It is only your view, not mine.

You have already agreed that all forms of life show some sort of intelligence. Please tell us exactly what you disagree with.

The universe

QUOTE: "Today, there are between 6-20 trillion galaxies in the Universe.
bbb"Most stars exist within Milky Way-like galaxies, but most galaxies aren’t like ours. (DAVID’s bold)

DAVID: the universe is massive, but our galaxy stands out. That difference led to the ability for our Earth to form. Viewed from a standpoint of design, it shows purposeful planning to reach some specialized galaxies that could contain the Earth. dhw wonders why God made the universe so big. I don't know, but as part of God's planning I just accept it as required.

There are still billions of them. This is one of the factors that make it so hard to believe in a single, sourceless mind, let alone one that “creates” such unimaginable numbers of heavenly bodies in order to produce one species and its food. It requires as much blind faith as that of the atheist who believes that the still unfathomable complexities of life can be engineered by sheer chance.