Evolution: a different view (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 13:18 (3283 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Do we really picture evolution as it really happened, or do we classify animals by prejudiced belief? DNA research is upending evolutionary cladistics relationships.-http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/consider-the-sponge-QUOTE: “The idea of one group of supposedly primitive animals going off-script and inventing a different nervous system, and then a second group actually losing theirs, is practically unconscionable. “There's a tendency to think that, in the evolutionary lottery, humans lucked out,” Dunn told me. “We have cool articulated skeletons with complex muscles, and brains that we're very proud of.” But the belief in an orderly, stepwise progression—sponge to ctenophore to bilaterian—is “complete rubbish,” he said. “It's deeply flawed, but it's there, inserting its imprint in how we talk and think.'”-Thank you for this, which is yet another example of your willingness to share information, regardless of its impact on your own beliefs. I can only commend you for your fair-mindedness!-Once again, this shows that evolution proceeds on its own merry way, with organisms branching off in different directions according to their needs under whatever conditions exist at the time. Innovations, extinctions, sponges, ctenophores, whales, weaverbirds...and all for the sake of humans? The conclusion is a devastating counter to the theory that everything has been planned with one aim in mind. The absence of any “orderly, stepwise progression” is a clear indication that no matter whether God started it all off or not, living organisms make their own history as they cope (or fail to cope) with an ever changing world.