New Miscellany Parts 1 &:2: evolution, zombies, tuning etc. (General)

by dhw, Saturday, April 26, 2025, 07:44 (11 hours, 9 minutes ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving. Yes or no?

dhw: How many more times? NO! The 0.1% of survivors produced the species that are alive today.

DAVID: But where did the survivors come from? The extinct produced the survivors. Evolution is a living continuum.

Extinction must have gone on continuously even before we arrived to play havoc with nature: principal factors would have been changes in local conditions, lack of resources, and competition. But what you call "continuity" has also been shattered by at least 6 mass extinctions, which each wiped out the vast majority of species existing at the time. I keep quoting the dinosaur example, but you prefer not to be given examples and, for some reason, you simply cannot grasp the fact that once any species is extinct it becomes incapable of producing anything.Continuity is broken. Extinction means it’s not there anymore. It doesn’t exist. Something that doesn’t exist cannot produce anything! Where did the survivors come from? They came from their mummies and daddies, who were the same species as themselves: the species that did NOT go extinct!

A start of multicellularity

dhw: You cannot believe that what your God created was precisely what he wanted to create. He simply has to be messy, cumbersome and inefficient, because your theory concerning his purpose and method must be right. […]

DAVID: God did create what He wished to create. Why He decided to evolve everything by evolution is from His unknown reasoning.

You ridicule him for his inefficiency because he created and had to cull 99 out of 100 species that had nothing to do with the species he wished to create. The “unknown reasoning” refers to your own inability to find a single reason why he would use such an inefficient method for the purpose you have imposed on him, but you cannot even consider the possibility that your illogical, derogatory theories might be wrong:

dhw: as you once openly confessed: “I first choose a form of God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” The rest is one set of contradictions after another, which you yourself once described as “schizophrenic”.

DAVID: I'll stick with my form of God.

See what I mean?

Zombification

DAVID: All ecosystems are intertwined and are therefore necessary for the whole Earth's living systems.

dhw: Still not an answer. Bearing in mind your belief that your God created all systems for the sole benefit of us humans, would you say that zombification is necessary for our existence and survival?

DAVID: It is part of an ecosystem as explained above. With all the articles produced here showing the delicacy of balances in nature you still don't get it. Remember reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone undid the damage done by humans removing them.

Every creature that ever lived has been “part of an ecosystem”, and ecosystems have constantly changed, and changes have constantly resulted in extinctions and the establishment of new ecosystems. We humans can destroy the balance, or restore the balance. But none of this means that your God specially created every ecosystem for the sole benefit of us humans, which is the theory you keep proposing and which makes absolutely no sense in the context of life’s history. That’s why you keep dodging the issue.

Ecosystems balance

DAVID: this article again shows how delicately lifestyles are balanced in the ecosystems of the Earth and how humans constantly create problems, but at least we learn from our errors.

All agreed. But see above re your anthropocentrism.

Possible alien life

dhw: Do you believe that the environmental and biological conditions necessary for life are present throughout the entire universe? Of course you don’t. And so it is nonsense to claim that the entire universe is fine-tuned for life. THAT is the whole point of this discussion.

DAVID: As the earth once could not support life but then evolved to allow it, other regions have the option to do it as this universe is basically constructed.

I had no idea you believed in free will for all regions to produce life, but even this theory has nothing to do with the subject of our dispute, which is your claim that “the entire universe is fine-tuned for life to appear.” No it isn’t, because the entire universe does not offer the environmental or biological conditions without which life is impossible. You agree, so please stop dodging.

Camouflage caterpillar

DAVID: considering this bug changes to mush in becoming a flying insect, this learned behavior caries through the metamorphosis process. This certainly looks like learned behavior, but considering the complexity of cozing up to spiders it may well be designed.

I’m beginning to wonder just what you mean by “designed”. The strategy must have begun at some point. Maybe through an accident, an audacious experiment, but no matter how it started, it was successful and was therefore passed on to subsequent generations. This would clearly indicate a degree of awareness/intelligence. However, I suspect that rather than allow for autonomous intelligence, you have your God designing the strategy 3.8 billion years ago or, alternatively, popping down to Earth to give caterpillars courses in camouflage. Because otherwise, how would we humans survive?