Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, May 06, 2013, 17:44 (4018 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Fine, but dabbling is the opposite of preprogramming.-DAVID: Only if preprogramming is perfect, but as you note below a lot can go on simultaneously. The universe is still forming, as is the Earth, so unless God preprogrammed everything there will be boggles. A volcano erupts and weather changes; continents drift, organisms adapt, but maybe sort of. Remember I assume a God who is not perfect and not omni-everything.-Then at last we can dispense with the idea that your God preprogrammed humans, since he couldn't preprogramme environmental change and therefore dabbled (i.e. experimented) or had to dabble (i.e. to fulfil his Turellian plan). If we could only understand their language, maybe whales would tell us your God also dabbled to make them. Or maybe whales and flycatching sundews and brontosauruses and even humans are all products of the "intelligent cell/genome/DNA", responding in countless higgledy-piggledy ways to the challenges and opportunities presented by an ever changing environment.-DAVID: All apes lived together in the beginning of apedom. We were apes also. Then we descended and they didn't. Your point must be:"Only our ancestors had a climate change and were forced to change"? You are evading my point, by a proposition of having all the apes separate into different groups and different climates before we descended. Not very likely. The early hominins lived right beside the apes as they developed and then avoided contact. No other just-so story makes any sense.-I don't understand your thinking here. The environmental-change proposition entails a particular group descending because of the change ... not "all the apes" separating before the descent. In other words, a local environmental change could lead to clever bononins descending and becoming hominins, while any remaining chimps, chumps and champs died off, whereas a few hundred miles away the bononins remained in their untouched forest, and so did the chimps, chumps and champs. Or maybe there were apes living in country that was part forest, part savanna, and some adventurous ones descended and liked it better down below. Nobody knows! But let's have a look at your own just-so story: in the year 4.399 million BC, a Universal Intelligence grabbed hold of a group of bononins, somehow reached inside their bodies, tweaked their genome, and lo and behold they descended from their trees, stood upright, and grew big brains, while all the other bononins, chimps, chumps and champs stayed up in the trees lookin' stoopid. Is this what you believe?