More Denton: Reply to David (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, July 20, 2015, 20:19 (3204 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I doubt Darwin theory because of the gaps in the fossil record which get more obvious as time passes and the fossil record becomes more complete. 
dhw: If the fossil record is becoming more complete, doesn't that suggest that the gaps are becoming less obvious? -DAVID: No, the gaps are more obvious. The fossil record, Darwin hoped would fill in the gaps. Instead the gaps are much more sharply defined. I specifically refer to the pre-Cambrian soft body findings. There is no 'complexity' run-up to the Cambrian.
-I was questioning your logic. Clearly if the gaps are becoming more sharply defined, the fossil record is NOT becoming more complete. (How can we possibly know its state of “completeness” anyway?) However, as I keep pointing out, if evolution proceeds in leaps through innovations that must work at once or perish, the mystery of the “gaps” is solved. -DAVID: The gaps require exquisite planning because they are so large, involving many complex interlocking changes, which I keep showing in references to the Cambrian. Darwin feared the Cambrian.
 
Agreed. The Cambrian illustrates why gradualism doesn't work. Exquisite planning applies to all organs, organisms, and Nature's Wonders. However, your assumption seems to be that only God and humans are capable of exquisite planning. The weaver bird is incapable of designing its nest, ants of designing their cities, bacteria of devising strategies for mastering different environments. “Large organisms chauvinism so we like to think that only we can do things in a cognitive way” (Shapiro). And so according to you, God “guided” them all, which means he either preprogrammed the first cells with every innovation and wonder, or he dabbled. I offer the alternative of cognitive organisms, regardless of size.
 
DAVID: Within germinal centers, B cells evolve in a Darwinian-like fashion. The gene responsible for producing their antibodies mutates rapidly, a million times faster than the normal rate of mutation in the human body, and the cells proliferate
Comment: This is the only example I know of that fits dhw's 'inventive mechanism' where cells can mutate at will for a specified purpose.
dhw: Thank you.-DAVID: From your point of view, I wouldn't thank me. [...] There is a chicken and egg problem in viewing this from the standpoint of Darwin-style chance evolution. How did organisms protect themselves from lethal infections before the immune process was fully developed? Do you want to propose that lethal organisms and immune mechanisms developed at an equal pace, hand in hand through chance? I don't.-As usual you scurry for refuge in Darwinian chance, which we agreed long ago is unlikely but which is easier for you to handle than my hypothesis that cells are intelligent, whether designed by God or not. If they can mutate at will a million times faster than normal for this one specified purpose, perhaps they can do the same for other purposes.
 
DAVID: You seem unaware that in Lenski's work he challenged the bacteria and got minor changes. His point was to study mutation as a process.-And my point is that this tells us nothing about the innovations that led from bacteria to humans, or about the time needed for that development. Nobody knows how it happened. We can only hypothesize, and Shapiro's work with bacteria suggests that they are intelligent - which might give us a clue as to how evolution happened. But you are only interested in bacteriologists whose research fits in with your own hypotheses.
 -dhw: Once the mechanism for life and evolution came into existence (how it did so is the mystery), the guidance may have come from organisms looking for ways both to survive and to improve themselves.
DAVID: You keep using strange images: 'organisms looking for ways to survive'?-Of course they look for ways to survive. Do you think your dog would lie down and starve if you didn't feed him? But I admit that whether they also look for ways to improve is a different matter - that is why I can only offer the inventive mechanism as a hypothesis, just as you offer a divine, multi-billion-year computer programme as a hypothesis.-dhw: What a wonderful piece of intellectual contortionism. Instead of humans being God's purpose, they now “seem to be the pinnacle”. And to whom do they seem to be the pinnacle? Ah, humans, of course.
DAVID: If evolution is defined as increasing complexity, a course it certainly seems to follow, what is more complex than humans?-Who came up with that definition? I understand evolution as the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms. But the contortionism I am referring to is the acrobatic twist from humans as God's purpose (the position you have constantly advocated) to humans as the pinnacle (which you now define as the most complex). But I'm not complaining! This is a welcome shift of focus.