Why sex evolved; no one knows (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 27, 2016, 18:05 (2857 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God provided a drive to complexity, which is what evolution shows.-But he could have provided a drive to complexity in the form of individual intelligences working out their own means of survival and/or improvement (which clearly entailed increased complexity), as opposed to your excruciatingly complicated 3.8-billion-year programme and/or dabbling.-dhw: If you can't find one [a reason], perhaps you will consider the possibility that he did NOT specially design the nest, but gave the weaverbird and all its fellow miracle-workers the means of devising their own wonders. 
DAVID: I still doubt that. Somehow He helped them design the nest.-You can't think of a reason why he would want to design it, and you don't know how he “helped”, but you doubt that he could have provided the weaverbird with the intelligence to do it. Why?
 
dhw: And if his final target was homo sapiens, what do you mean by “we need to consider” a scattergun hominin group? Again I would ask why your God created “multiple choice” programmes for all the different hominins if he just wanted homo sapiens.
DAVID: Because the example we see is that all of evolution is scattergun.-All of evolution, including human evolution, is indeed “scattergun”, which makes nonsense of the idea that everything, including the weaverbird's nest, was planned for a specific purpose, other than for the “scattergun” history of life as we know it! Why plan or dabble the higgledy-piggledy if all he wanted was homo sapiens? Here is your non-answer:
 
DAVID: Why don't you like His obvious method? Because you like your way of doing things which is logical. God's logic, from the evidence is to complexify and scattergun resultant creatures.-That fits in with my hypothesis and not yours! If your God preprogrammed or dabbled the weaverbird's nest or different forms of hominin, it was NOT scattergun. It's only scattergun if your God leaves organisms to do their own inventing. The idea of your God preprogramming the first cells to pass on a set of nest-building/hominizing lottery tickets to choose from only adds another layer of pointless complication. -Dhw: If you really want to be a ‘lumper', you need to find a reason for the whole higgledy-piggledy, and that means finding a reason for the weaver bird's nest as well as for the human brain.
DAVID: I don't need to find reasons. That is your problem. I look at process and the resultant end as the basis of my position. If I can't read God's planning process in His mind, I can't fill in reasons that satisfy a human mind.-You quite rightly (in my view) spend a great deal of time asking how the complexities and wonders of life could possibly have come about by chance. How would you react if our atheist friends told you that was your problem? If they and you can't make sense of your own hypotheses, that may be because those hypotheses are wrong!