Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, May 04, 2013, 11:58 (4020 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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.-Thank you. This is a great help to our understanding of each other. My only objection is to the word "preprogrammed", which suggests that he built into the very first organisms a programme for all the organs that would in due course lead to humans. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing right from the start. It makes far more sense to me that, if your God exists, either he started the whole thing off as a massive experiment to see where it would lead (no particular purpose in mind), or he did have a purpose in mind, but didn't know how to achieve it. I think your scenario favours the latter, whereas I see the former as more consistent with the higgledy-piggledy bush. (Both scenarios allow for dabbling.) I agree that none of us know how species appear, but I do think the concept of the "intelligent cell/genome/DNA" offers a convincing explanation of innovation, which is the driving force of evolution. Of course it leaves open the question of how such a mechanism could have come into being.-dhw: Climate change is not the only cause of new environments. Catastrophes and diseases can change a habitat locally and with extreme rapidity.-DAVID: 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.-We are talking of isolated fossils over a period of millions of years. The gap between Ardi and Sediba is about two and a half million. Even our own lifespan embraces countless localized disasters. The elm has virtually disappeared over here, and the ash is in great danger, because of disease. Given the fact that we are talking about "large areas of the globe" and hundreds of thousands of lifespans, it seems perfectly feasible that separate hominins may have evolved in separate localities. Isn't this precisely what is meant by "convergent evolution"? You only need a few localized "savannah" disasters over millions of years to explain why there were no trees for apes to live in. What is your alternative? That God decided to dabble with a few chosen apes in a few chosen places over a few million years?-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.-DAVID: I thought you had concluded there must be a first cause, but that you were uncomfortable with the three concepts we have been discussing.
 
Precisely.-DAVID: Do you accept the point that a first cause (of some type) started everything, or are we here from no good reasonable start?-I have always accepted that a first cause of some type started everything. Nothing can come from nothing. But that doesn't make our three concepts any the more believable. That's why your choice ultimately depends on faith.