The Dodo Problem (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 02, 2010, 11:17 (5104 days ago) @ David Turell

In response to satyansh and David.-Satyansh: well all i know is there isnt really a definitive answer as to whether it is IE or NS. But david what i wanna know is how are you so positive that it has to be IE 
(Intelligent Design)-David has already responded, and I do hope you will read the post he has referred to, as I think it's an excellent summary of the case for ID. You're certainly right that there is no definitive answer, but from my agnostic standpoint I'd like to correct a common misunderstanding ... which I've pointed out before. Intelligent Design (ID) and Natural Selection (NS) are not alternatives. You can believe in both. NS is only part of the theory of evolution. It explains why some species survive and others don't. It tells us nothing about the origin of life, or even the origin of new organs and new species, which may depend on chance mutations and adaptation to changes in the environment. Those theists who accept the theory of evolution believe God created the whole mechanism. Atheists believe the mechanism initially came into being by sheer chance. Darwin himself was an agnostic, and said quite explicitly that his theory was perfectly compatible with belief in a Creator.-You have asked why God (if he exists) bothered to "create us in steps", and that question lies at the heart of this "dodo" thread. The fact that conditions had to be made suitable for us to live in has been clearly demonstrated by both Tony (balance_maintained) and David, and so early, primitive forms of microbial and plant life were necessary. But once conditions were right, why go through all those generations of, for example, dinosaurs if the intention right from the start was to produce humans? This is the point of disagreement between David and myself, and if there really was a Universal Intelligence at work, I'm suggesting as you do that it continued to experiment. Sitting back and watching countless species branching off, living and dying while the initial mechanism works its way towards humanity does not seem like logical planning to me.-DAVID: No one has said that the UI is logical at our level of thought.
Your own approach to the question of ID versus chance has always been scientific and humanly logical. I don't know why, on this one issue of pre-planning, you feel you need to jettison human logic.-DAVID: It was pre-planned to happen. (Later: The mechanisms are built in.)
I can't say it was NOT pre-planned, any more than you can say it WAS pre-planned. We are as evenly matched in our speculative ignorance as we are in our stubbornness! -
DAVID: You have the UI dabbling and dithering too much IMHO. There should be (I don't know this) some degree of preciseness if one can easily create a universe as starters.
Instead of the UI dabbling and dithering, you have him inventing a mechanism that is anything but precise with its branching here, there and everywhere, plus its dependence on random changes in the environment. In any case, what you call dabbling and dithering, others may call scientific experimentation. -DAVID: There are self-correcting safeguards against tampering, the complex feed back loops of epigenetics.
So a power that can easily create a universe as starters is incapable of "tampering" with its own invention? -I fear that we two mules will never agree on this. The offer of a truce remains open!