Darwinist ignorance, confusion & epigenetics (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 22, 2010, 14:30 (5115 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If one sets into motion an evolutionary process that (in my view) works by fits and starts, punctuated equilibrium, it will take time and it will pass through all sorts of species 'attempts'.-If a UI experiments and improvises as it goes along, not knowing where things are heading, the process will work by fits and starts, punctuated equilibrium, it will take time, and it will pass through all sorts of species 'attempts'.-DAVID: I doubt He thinks it is messy. It happened and it worked. Your 
imagination about God's choices doesn't want to accept the pattern that happened. We don't need to analyze each step. It is the pattern that counts. From one-celled guys, splitting in two (binary fission), to the joys of love making within giant brains. You are judging an evolutionary design, just as atheists judge the backwards retina, as we find the actual purposes for the backwardness.-Your pattern is that the UI programmed evolution right from the start to end up with us humans, i.e. its goal was to produce humans. The alternative that I'm suggesting is that either it hadn't got a clue where evolution was heading, or it didn't know how to get to us and so had to keep experimenting. In both scenarios, the pattern goes from one-celled guys to binary fission to the joys of love-making, though I must confess I tend not to use my giant brain for that activity. There is absolutely no difference in this overall pattern. The difference lies precisely in the steps that I am analysing, which ARE part of the pattern. Why assume that there is an unknown, essential reason for the dodos and the dinosaurs and the diddymen when there is a perfectly rational alternative explanation? Your imagination about God's choices doesn't want to accept the pattern that happened ... it only wants to accept the beginning and the end.-DAVID: You are overanalytical and critical of what you see. For humans the whole thing worked beautifully. I know Darwin didn't like the strong eating the weak, but the game is played as it is played. The rules are there. Ah!, brainstorm, why cricket when baseball is so much more logical, and evolved from cricket, a simpler form?-Why is it overanalytical and critical to suggest that the UI made things up as it went along? The process still works out beautifully for humans. And there is not one single piece of the pattern that doesn't fit in, from start to finish, as you have already acknowledged in your post of 18 November at 15.17. Personally, I don't find anything in the least off-putting about the notion of God the experimental scientist, learning as he goes along, and so I wonder why you do. Is the old, omniscient, omnipotent Jewish God still stirring things within that huge brain of yours? On the other hand, the atheist side of my agnosticism has to admit that a single mechanism followed by an unguided, messy, wasteful and roundabout process fits in nicely with the chance theory (although, of course, I do not subscribe to that either).
 
With regard to cricket being a simpler form of baseball, and baseball being more logical, as everyone on this website knows, any American who claims to understand cricket doesn't understand cricket.