Does evolution have a purpose? (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 16, 2014, 21:19 (3473 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Thursday, October 16, 2014, 22:05

DAVID: You are perfectly right that if we assume God has infinite powers, as stated by the Bible, He should be able to invent an IM that can run totally on its own. I am looking for a method that gives us bushiness and humans without pre-programming or dabbling. -I have suggested one already, but I think you're looking for a method that will remove the contradiction between bushiness and your interpretation of God's intentions (i.e. the production of humans). -DAVID: But that is the reason I use the modifier, semi-autonomous. Both my statements you quoted make sense if we assume that God is jealous of His intent for humans to appear. With a semiautonomous IM which might not necessarily follow a fully pre-programmed path to humans, it allows for bushiness, but with built-in instructions given an ultimate direction, it can wander around to some degree, but still wind up producing humans-Your assumption about God's intentions has left you in an even worse dilemma than before: you want the IM to be free, so you can explain the bush, and you don't want it to be free because you want humans to be the goal. And so you say the IM is not preprogrammed (free) and yet contains an instruction manual (not free) that does not contain “specific instructions” (October 14) (slightly free) though it has “built-in instructions given an ultimate direction” (not free at all) (October 15). How can the built-in instructions to produce humans leave the IM free to invent the billions of innovations without which humans could not exist? You are in danger of choking on your cake!-dhw: ...why should we not assume that this free-for-all was his intention - instead of claiming that he was targeting just one species out of billions? -DAVID: Because humans are here and like no other life form in the entire bushiness. I'm simply asking a 'why' question. We have animal bodies produced by evolution and enormous brains for no good reason I can see, except a purpose that is Adler's point in his most influential book. -Our enormous brains help us to survive and to improve (the two purposes I have suggested underlie the whole evolutionary process). Every Nature's Wonder with which you have enriched this website has done the same thing in its own unique way. Why do dogs have a sense of smell a thousand times more powerful than our own? Did the first cells contain “built-in instructions” for doggy noses? My hypothesis suggests that the doggy nose in an animal body and the human brain in an animal body both evolved through the intelligent cooperation of a few million IMs. But you think God must have preprogrammed (built-in instructions) the human brain, and not the doggy nose.
 
DAVID: We are a different kind. Why would an unorganized chance mechanism like Darwin's theory of evolution do that? With Darwin only chance is available. So you would have to propose humans by chance.-You always scurry back to Darwin's random mutations, which the two of us have long since agreed to jettison. The only chance element here is environmental change. The IM designs. It does not rely on chance.-DAVID: The gradual change in the human brain size and complexity happened but in no other line of descent. When we know there are many, many examples of life's inventiveness and convergences, why no convergence in brains? -Why don't all organisms have doggy noses? Every species has to find its niche in the given environment, and to develop a behavioural pattern that will enable it to survive. Then there's probably stasis until a change in the environment causes some to perish, some to adapt, and some to innovate. That, I suggest, is how new species (in the broad sense - not different species of dog) formed, every one with a speciality that makes it different from others. Our speciality is the brain. Other species may have survived without needing to change, but somewhere along the line, the IM in one group of chimps (or whatever) came up with something as new as the doggy nose once was.
 
DAVID: We don't need a god of thunder, rainbows are not miracles, etc. But when I see humans as a result of evolution, I see purpose. Purpose and design are soulmates. I see purpose and design everywhere. Everything looks very directed, in my eyes.-And to mine, but if my hypothesis of an IM is true, the direction comes from within: every species, including humans, has designed its own unique properties to serve the purpose of survival and/or improvement. But you are using the word “purpose” to denote a divine plan that culminates in humans, because despite constantly enjoining us not to try and read God's mind, you insist on doing so yourself and then you try to adapt life's history to your reading, even though you can see that it just doesn't fit. Eat the cake, dear David!