New Miscellany 1: evolution, insects, intelligence (General)

by David Turell , Monday, May 19, 2025, 15:14 (1 day, 4 hours, 15 min. ago) @ dhw

The smelly hoatzin

DAVID: Your absurd complaint about God's use of evolution has exhausted its usefulness for discussion and is not worth any response. Your usual retreat into thousands or millions of years tells us nothing concrete. We can only know the present: no new evolution of new species.

dhw" I have not complained about your God’s use of evolution. I have complained about your absurd theory, which ridicules both his inefficiency and our language, in which inefficiency denotes a strange form of efficiency. It is also you who insist that evolution is finished (bolded above), which proves that your God’s one and only purpose was to design us and our food. Now you admit that we have no idea what the future holds, in which case you have demolished your own “proof” that we and our food were your God’s sole purpose in creating life.

My thoughts about the past are based on real facts and are not negated by guesses about the future.

Animal minds: Insect tool use

DAVID: Yes, ants which may be a special case.

dhw: So ants prove that insects are intelligent. Last Thursday you wrote: “It is my stated position above that I accepted insect intelligence”, but on Friday you wanted to test for it, and now you no longer accept insect intelligence, and ants may be a special case.

Testing the insects proves the point.

Mind and cosmos leading to cellular intelligence

You have totally ignored this whole section of my post, which is a response to your dismissal of the theory of cellular intelligence immediately after your acceptance of it

dhw: But you attribute all the changes to your God’s preprogramming or intervention, with the 99.9% death rate the result of his inefficiency, made all the more damaging to his image by the fact that he designed them while knowing they were irrelevant to his purpose.

DAVID: Reiterating your usual mantra as above. All evolutions have loss of forms as part of the natural culling process. You must have forgotten this point.

dhw: We only know of one evolution of life on Earth, and you have forgotten that according to you, there was no “natural culling process” because a) your God is/was in total control of it, b) his sole purpose was to design us plus food, and c) he designed and had to cull the 99.9%, which is why d) you ridicule his inefficiency. When will you stop dodging?

Stop it. There are many evolutionary processes we can study. All show culling. You keep trying to sell your nutty distorted view of God's evolution of humans.