Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 03, 2017, 15:29 (2663 days ago) @ David Turell

I shall juxtapose parts of your post to make the argument clearer.

dhw: Where is the 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme that your God installed in the first cells, to be passed on for all these natural wonders?
DAVID: I keep presenting advances in understanding the many layers of the genome and how the actions of the genes in DNA can be modified. the 3.8 BYO program is in all those layers, of which we still understand only a small bit.

Not only do we understand only a small bit of the many layers of the genome, but we also understand only a small bit of how consciousness/intelligence works. At least it is possible to test the intelligence of organisms. I don’t know how you can test for the existence of a detailed programme for the whole of evolution beginning 3.8 billion years ago.

dhw: Please give us an example of an inventive change which you consider organisms are capable of organizing autonomously.
DAVID: I can't. It is only a proposition of what might exist. We do recognize epigenetic adaptations, but they are minor, as we both agree. There is no evidence how complex speciation occurs, as in the whale series.

So you believe that there might be a freewheeling inventive mechanism, but you do not believe it is possible for “these critters” (see below) to freewheel or invent anything. Not much help there. In addition to speciation, there is no evidence as to how complex lifestyles and wonders occur, as in the monarch butterfly and the weaverbird’s nest. Your hypothesis and mine are only “propositions of what might exist”, but we can at least try to fit these propositions to the history of evolution as we know it.

Dhw (re the weaverbird’s nest): Why is it “obvious” that the knots are too complex for the bird to have invented? We know from experiments that some birds are capable of solving complex problems.
DAVID: The complex uses of tools by crows are not comparable to the knots making nests that hang off trees.

They are proof of intelligence and of the ability to use their own natural attributes to perform complex tasks. Building a nest with knots is comparable to beavers’ dams and ants’ cities.

DAVID: I do not believe these critters have the mental capacity to produce their own saltations.

But you do believe that the very first cells contained programmes for every single saltation, and so for reasons you yourself cannot fathom, God personally designed all these wonders, extinct and extant, plus all bacterial adaptations throughout life’s history, in order to produce humans.

DAVID: Humans are obviously the pinnacle of evolutionary creation. Why not my scenario?

Because my scenario also allows for divine dabbling and for humans to be the pinnacle, but – in contrast to your own scenario - explains the higgledy-piggledy bush. As I see it, you are forced into this disjointed pre-planning scenario because for some reason you cannot stand the thought that your God might not have had everything worked out in advance or might even have deliberately created a world that could produce the unpredictable.