Innovation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, May 03, 2013, 21:57 (4021 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw:If humans were preprogrammed from the very start, then every single innovation from bacteria onwards had to be preprogrammed...... So during the Cambrian Explosion, for instance, your God deliberately created both extinct and surviving organisms on the non-human branches (= dabbling), while the human branch went through its preordained programme, though sharing almost all its organs with the unpreprogrammed species. Is this what you believe?-To clear the air: I believe that evolution is preprogrammed to make humans. I don't know how much of mid-course direction was required, since I do not ascribe to religions' view that God is entirely capable of anything he desires and He knows everything, past and present and future. He may have constraints. I see what look like dabbles. I also know that the genome system He gave early life allows for adaptations, but I am not sure that Darwin style theory of evolution allows for speciation. All sides of the argument should admit, we don't really know how species appear. Any proposal is pure supposition. My conclusion is that evolution occurred, but under divine controls, more or less, again unclear as to how much or how little.
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> dhw: Climate change is not the only cause of new environments. Catastrophes and diseases can change a habitat locally and with extreme rapidity.-I know you love catastrophism, but hominins appeared over large areas of the globe, in many different climates, as a 'bush' of precurers, and I recognize your factors as important, but that doesn't get around the fact that savannah proposals don't explain the willingness to climb down into danger. It would be just as important to explain why the apes didn't descend.-> 
> DHW: we have three nebulous first causes, one of which is yours and none of which are mine. The atheist one depends on luck, and yours and the panpsychist one do not.-I thought you had concluded there must be a first cause, but that you were uncomfortable with the three concepts we have been discussing. Do you accept the point that a first cause (of some type) started everything, or are we here from no good reasonable start?