Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, January 16, 2017, 12:55 (2654 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Zombification is an effect on the brain, taking control. This means modifying neuronal outputs; not simple as in your supposition.
dhw: The article doesn’t tell us why the bug did “crazy things”. But my point is the general one that I see no reason why your God should have to design these lifestyles when it’s quite feasible that the organisms work them out for themselves, or even – as you imagined in the case of the ants and the nuts – discover something useful by accident and have the intelligence to exploit it and pass it on.
DAVID: I described how zombification must occur. It is a well-known phenomenon. The ants/ seeds story is a very straight forward series of decisions, some but not much intelligence needed.

Still doesn’t explain why your God had to preprogramme or personally dabble each one. I’m happy with “some” intelligence. My point is that we really don’t know HOW intelligent these organisms might be.

DAVID: Mammal brains are more complex than any of their other organs. Dinosaur brains were little more than large ganglions, collections of neurons without many circuits.

This doesn’t mean that “evolution advances to the most complex survivors”. And so I repeat: the brain is not the only complex organ, we don’t know how intelligent dinosaurs were, and not all surviving organisms are mammals.

DAVID: Now that Neil has upgraded your computer, aren't you impressed by how much its software can do? The initial cells of life are still evolving over a four billion year history. Origin of life and evolution are a perfect continuum of software control in the genome. Very obvious to me.

So let me once more try to get this clear. Are you saying that your God put millions of individual, personally designed nest-building, zombifying, migrating, camouflaging, parasitizing, adapting, innovating pieces of software in the very first cells, and/or personally updated the software as new problems or new opportunities arose? And also that your God preprogrammed or updated the software to delete 99% of all these in order to “balance nature” as and when his preprogrammed or personally updated cosmic and earthly environmental software made the necessary changes to conditions? And all these millions of programmes and/or updatings of organisms and of the environment were designed (and/or deleted) for the sake of humans? And it is not possible that the perfect continuum from the origin of life to all the products of evolution extant and extinct is the result of a single piece of software enabling reproduction and variation through an autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism?