Innovation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 30, 2013, 15:50 (4024 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: I made the same point about bacteria, as evidence that innovation and not adaptation is the driving force behind evolution. ..... but you can't sneak humans in under the same umbrella unless you wish to argue that your God preprogrammed the eyes, sex, lungs, livers, brains etc. of all the species that preceded humans. "Springing out of the primate herd" could only be a divine dabble, or a stroke of genius by the intelligent cell/genome/DNA mechanism (see below).-I have no idea, as previously stated of the proportions of dabble/preprogramming that made evolution advance to US, but my point about humans has nothing to do with the fact that apes had "eyes, sex, lungs, livers",etc. Humans were obviously thrust out of the simian herd. There was no need for upright posture, big brain, etc. Climate may have altered African climate, but no other slightly biped tree swinging ape changed!-My hero Alfred Russel Wallace came to this conclusion first: "Wallace's worldview was far more coherent than is often claimed." Differences with Darwin came to the fore regarding human evolution. Whereas Darwin expected evolution by natural selection to transform an ape-like animal into a human, Wallace rejected this scenario. He argued for "some kind of non-material intervention in the genesis of humans". His religious views allowed him to be open to this hypothesis, although his arguments were drawn from scientific observations of different races of humanity.
"The more I see of uncivilized people, the better I think of human nature on the whole, and the essential differences between so-called civilized and savage man seem to disappear." 
"[Wallace realised that] many humans have abilities that they never have the opportunity to use. Such a situation, Wallace reasoned, cannot evolve through natural selection alone, which promotes only those traits that are useful. Wallace concluded that human evolution required some divine intervention. This argument shows an excellent appreciation of the mechanics of natural selection [. . . ]"(my bold)-Ref: Alfred Russel Wallace: Evolution's red-hot radical
 Andrew Berry
 Nature, 496, 162-164 (11 April 2013) | doi:10.1038/496162a-
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> DAVID: As long as you put the 'intelligence' in the genome for each cell I am fine. And as long as you recognize the organism as a whole run by its whole DNA I'm fine. 
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> dhw: Then we are both fine, and I shall hold you to this for evermore!-Yes, fine.-> 
> dhw: I would have to be a total idiot to deny that the genome is an amazing coding plan. As for an intelligence that can think and plan, I would gladly admit it if you could tell me how such an intelligence ... a zillion times more amazing than that of the genome, with the ability to create whole universes and the tiniest of microorganisms ... could have come into existence without any sort of prior "thinking and planning". First Cause explains nothing. -If cause and effect exist, there has to be a first cause which is eternal and always there. First Cause is there by necessity. Leibnitz: "Why is there anything?", must be answered. I'm sorry if you don't want to answer, then why think and puzzle at all? You are the guy who opened up this website to raise just such observations and questions, and I am your goad, as in Wallace to Darwin.