More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, August 26, 2024, 13:24 (21 days ago) @ David Turell

99.9% versus 0.1%

DAVID: Yes, I find it hard to understand full blown creation in the Cambrian and then a slow evolution until now. All I can do is accept God's reasoning.

dhw: So your theory that he deliberately created and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 pre- and post-Cambrian species that were irrelevant to his goal has nothing to do with your ridicule of his inefficiency? What you accept is not his reasoning, which you cannot know, but your own theory which makes no sense even to you.

DAVID: You constantly fall back on a statistical distortion of Raup's work. What survives today (0.1%) had 99.9% extinct ancestors. It is God's reasoning to evolve us which I accept. Perfectly reasonable.

Will you please stop obfuscating. The statistic that 99.9% of our ancestors (e.g. all the different hominins) are extinct has nothing to do with the fact that 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived were NOT our ancestors. I have once more reproduced your own quote, plus the dinosaur example, on the “evolution” thread. But here is it is again, since you constantly ignore it:
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.

Example: 696 dinosaur species became extinct and bbbhad no descendantsbbb. 4 dinosaur species evolved into current species. How could the 696 dinosaurs have been direct ancestors of current species if they had no descendants?

The universe

DAVID: So, you are not blind? The design you recognize must have a designing mind. Perhaps we can agree there is/was a designer who may not care about us. No Godly attributes. Fair enough? Sort of a deism.

dhw: This thread is not about a possible God’s possible nature, but about his very existence. (But if he does care, that is a human attribute, and you have rejected deism because you believe he has this human attribute although he has no human attributes.) Atheists are blind to your design argument, and you are blind to their argument that if complex minds require a designer, how can an infinitely more complex mind exist without having been designed? My eyes are open to both arguments, but I admit to my ignorance of the truth. Agnostics don’t try to persuade people that they know the answers. We can only explain why we can’t believe in the answers that are on offer.

DAVID: We can agree a mind is required. We see a fine-tuned-for-life universe, an organism with a deeply thinking brain.

The universe we know of consists of billions of galaxies which – as far as we know - are not finely tuned for life. That is one of the problems for us agnostics. The atheist would say the greater the number of heavenly bodies, the greater the odds in favour of a chance beginning.

How mosquitoes find dinner

QUOTE: "'Despite their diminutive size, mosquitoes are responsible for more human deaths than any other animal."

dhw: Thank you again, David, for another extraordinary article. I’m surprised, though, that you didn’t add your usual comment that this extremely complex mechanism must have been designed. As such, it provides yet another question under the subject of theodicy. Why would an all-good God design such a lethal weapon against humanity?

DAVID: You might add why the deadly parasites?

I do.

DAVID: The mosquito is an innocent carrier. The article quote is wrong.

I have no idea about the statistics, but of course we can’t blame the mosquito. The question is why an all-good God would have designed it in the first place.

Our heart differs from great apes

QUOTE: Our research suggests that the human heart has adapted to support our upright stance, movement and larger brain.

DAVID: we evolved away from other mammals because of our unusual mobility and exercise capacity.

Yes, it seems to be a clear case of a cell community (organ) adapting to new conditions.