Contingent evolution: what pushes it? (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, November 01, 2014, 11:43 (3465 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DAVID: Not continental drift, not oxygen shifts. These open up the door, but something else has to push it.-http://phys.org/news/2014-10-oxygen-percent-today-roughly-billion.html-OOL researchers love to push reasons like this for the appearance of life and of evolutionary progress. Factors yet, but O2 only allows for progress, but doesn't create the progress. Science writers are close to worthless in descrimination.-TONY: So, the atmosphere would actually have prevented the rise of life that was necessary in order to actively change the atmosphere to what it is today, and then it fantastimagically changed just-so by completely random chance just as life was ready and waiting to spring into existence. .... ... ... And people are critical of me for believing in God....-We seem to have read different articles. They are not talking about the origin of life, but about the rise of animal life. There is an interesting article attached to this one (click on animal life), which suggests that multicellular life existed 60 million years before the Cambrian Explosion. I'm a bit surprised at the sneering tone of your posts (both here and on David's Cambrian thread). No matter what explanation you may have for the evolution of animals, there has to be a reason why it took place at that particular point in Earth's history. Animals need a certain amount of oxygen, so it's not unreasonable to suppose that until oxygen was present in the right quantities, animal life could not be sustained. You may impose your own view that your God decided to change the Earth's atmosphere so that he could make new organisms, or he saw that the new atmosphere could allow for new forms of life so he dabbled. That's up to you. But the article itself merely associates the rise of animal life with a possible change in the atmosphere. Perfectly logical.
 
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