More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, August 19, 2024, 13:13 (94 days ago) @ David Turell

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

dhw:[…] much of evolution was a gradual process, as organs and organisms complexified.

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

dhw: Organs/organisms continued to evolve DURING the Cambrian. Anyway. Have a look at this:

DAVID: The below is a total diversion. SHOW ME HOW THE EYES IN THE CAMBRAIN EVOLVED. YOU CAN'T.

The article demonstrates how eyes may have developed from simple to sophisticated. How can that be a diversion from the point that eyes complexified from simple to sophisticated? But no, I am in no position to provide you with a detailed history of every type of eye that evolved from the start to the finish of the Cambrian. The true history remains a mystery. I’ll leave the article, just in case new readers might be interested in its answers to your question.

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.

dhw: 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” [...] .

DAVID: Your screwy interpretation trudges on. The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving.

Your schizophrenia is getting beyond a sick joke. If species have no descendants, they can't have produced descendants. How many more times will you disagree with yourself? Will you now repeat your astonishing theory that 696 extinct dinosaurs "became over 10,000 bird species!” Please tell your Mr Hyde to read the following:

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.

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.

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

DAVID: The analogy of human variation does not make sense. All cells are limited to very minor adaptions.

Of course the analogy makes sense. There are different levels of intelligence in humans as in other cell communities. You simply reject the possibility of cells clever enough to innovate.

The universe

QUOTE: "Today, there are between 6-20 trillion galaxies in the Universe."

DAVID: […] 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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: You are left with the sourceless mind!!!

Repeat: your sourceless mind requires as much blind faith as the atheist’s faith in chance. I'm left with a choice between two equally unlikely-seeming hypotheses. That ‘s why I'm an agnostic.