More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 20, 2024, 11:59 (27 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:
[No need to reproduce the article now]

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: These Darwinist conjectures, non-answers, apply only after the Cambrian explosion.

QUOTE: “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."

And your comment does not invalidate my statement that much of evolution was gradual, as organs and organisms complexified. Eyes and brains are good example of increased complexification.

99.9% versus 0.1%

dhw: 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.

DAVID: We are a part of the 0.1% surviving.

Correct. And we are descended from 0.1% of past species, not from the 99.9% that had no descendants. End of discussion.

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: Design demands a designer! Doesn't it?

Design of evolution can be explained by designers – billions of them (intelligent cells). If you ask who designed the designers, the atheist will ask you who designed your designer – as if it’s OK to assume a supreme designer came from nothing, whereas loads of mini-designers had to have a source. A “first cause” universal, conscious mind seems to me as unlikely as “first cause” chance producing evolvable mini-minds.

Theoretical origin of life

DAVID: this is actually laughable. How do all these critical chemicals naturally congregate in one special place? Intelligent design in the lab.

I am reminded of the conclusion to my brief guide:

Let me, however, conclude with our starting-point of agnosticism, and offer you two alternative forms of madness: 1) countless numbers of people, sums of money, buildings, institutions, wars, miseries, joys, works of art have been devoted to or have sprung from human worship of something that never existed; 2) the designer’s creations are just beginning to understand, after centuries of conscious endeavour, how life functions, but they are still unable to design an organism like themselves that can spring from inanimate matter into living existence, reproduce itself, adapt to changing environments, invent new mechanisms, and pass on its adaptations and innovations to the organisms it engenders. They believe, however, that if they ever can consciously and deliberately design such an organism, it will prove that they themselves were not designed. Take your pick.