More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 31, 2024, 22:51 (2 hours, 37 minutes ago) @ dhw

Moroccan fossils

dhw: […] What crucial gap does it fill? It’s pretty obvious that different hominins and homos appeared in different environments. Even today we can see that sapiens have appeared with different racial characteristics, again depending on which part of the world they inhabit or once inhabited. [...]

DAVID: Bechly thinks most odd homo fossils are all variants on the way to H. sapiens.

dhw: Or they could themselves be variants of H. sapiens.

Of course.

Cancer and cellular autonomy

DAVID: You see cancer cells that out-think God? No! they become free to subvert God's instructions and use them for their own survival.

dhw: They out-think him if they follow his instructions in ways he didn't intend -unless he wanted us killed! I think your statement that “cancer cells act autonomously” makes more sense, and is less insulting to your God, if “autonomously” means independently, through decisions of their own making.

Subverting God's instructions to survive does not insult God. There is lots of freedom of action in the biochemistry of life.

ecosystem importance)

dhw: […] If his only purpose was to design us and our food, what was the purpose of the millions of organisms and ecosystems that came and went before we were here?

DAVID: God chose evolution over 3.8 billion years. The result is humans and their necessary resources.

dhw: And your purposeful God’s possible purpose for designing and culling the millions of organisms and ecosystems unconnected with us and our resources was….???

Unknown. He chose to evolve us but we cannot know why.

Another eukaryote article

DVID: All Shapiro showed was that bacteria can edit DNA as needed. You extrapolate as desired!

dhw: Shapiro extrapolated his theory from his own research and that of others in various fields. You yourself have even quoted others.

OK

Evolution Without natural selection

Quotes:[…’ if the only materialist theory accounting for the nature of things is discredited, this in good logic leaves only supra-natural causation on the table. (David’s bold)

“What Darwin had meant to say, Lyell proposed, was natural preservation (which is wholly unpremeditated and in essence merely a statistic without creative power)[/b].” (David’s bold)

As Richard Milner has commented, “Natural selection is an eliminative process that does not explain the generation, proliferation and direction of varieties.(David’s bold)

DAVID: the second and third bolds above is the position we have established here. Natural selection has no design capacity. It is a result of the struggle to survive. The first bold is my position. Why not design and its designer?

dhw: We agree that natural selection creates nothing. “Preservation” versus “selection” is a matter of terminology, not scientific fact. Neil Thomas would be on safer ground if he attacked the theory of random mutations, but he never mentions it! A second alternative, is Shapiro’s theory (backed by many scientists) that cells are intelligent entities, capable of designing their own innovations. This theory removes randomness, in no way invalidates what Darwin meant by “natural selection”, or his all-important theory of common descent, or supra-natural causation”. (As an agnostic, Darwin never excluded the supra-natural anyway.)

Survival is the real point, not natural selection.