Life's biologic complexity: Automatic molecular actions (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 14, 2016, 14:01 (2682 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Why did pre-whales enter the water? Are you telling us that your God made them do so just because he wanted them to be more complex?
DAVID: The purpose is complexity.

And what is the purpose of complexity?

DAVID: The importance of considering mutations is that the different forms in the whale series are each so different, it would require many thousand changes, each planned to coordinate with other changes to create a useful new species on the way to today's whales.

Agreed. The same applies to every innovation you can think of. That is how evolution has progressed from bacteria to humans: every one resulting in new species, some more complex than others. You now have your God specially designing whales, nests, migratory lifestyles and symbiotic relations, but you have no idea how they all tie in with his purpose of producing humans. And yet you won’t even consider the possibility that (theistic version) he might have given all these different organisms the means of pursuing their own purpose: i.e. working out and implementing a way of life that suits themselves.

DAVID: Your statement about the way change occurred harks back to Darwin:
"the changes according to my hypothesis would have been the result of their entering the water to get it [food], though in this case I would suggest that the changes need not have been immediate, since the earliest versions could have returned to land after their fishing expeditions."
Again the suggestion of itty-bitty experimental adaptations, which the fossil record denies. There are only big gaps! The remainder of your statement simply expands upon the same approach. Trial and error. We don't know how speciation occurs but each form is very different until we get to Humpbacks and Orcas.

No, we don’t know how speciation occurs. My hypothesis is that pre-whales explored the water, and the changes came about when they took to the new environment, and later changes may have been to improve swimming, breathing, steering. I think all of evolution advances that way: finding new means of exploiting changing conditions. My reference to the possibility that pre-whales might have returned to land was not to changes but to the fact that they didn’t have to decide all of a sudden that they would become aquatic. Whereas if I’ve understood you correctly, you think God fiddled around with them on land and then suddenly pushed them into the water already fully equipped for aquatic life, because he wanted them to be more complex (and later to be more complex).

The remainder of my post did not expand on the same approach. I was surprised that you “seem to think that the changes are all perfectly feasible if your God wanted pre-whales to be more complex for the sake of being more complex, whereas they are not feasible if your God gave pre-whales the means to make their own changes once they discovered how to improve their way of life.” This is a major issue between us in our (theistic) interpretation of life’s history.