Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, May 21, 2017, 15:05 (2525 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Today God apparently designs speciation before the change of environment. Just clarifying.
DAVID: All I am proposing is that speciation can obviously occur without relationship to environment. Does environment play a role in initiating new species? Yes, it allowed the Cambrian to appear as oxygen levels rose, but oxygen itself didn't require the species to appear. Species therefore most likely appear without reference to environmental drive.

“Relationship”? No matter how it comes into being, it must “relate” positively to the environment or it won’t survive, so it can hardly be “separate from environment”, but thank you for agreeing that a change in the environment can trigger speciation. It was I who drew your attention to the Cambrian as an example. “Environmental drive”? The drive is for survival and/or improvement, which you call complexity. Both must interconnect with the environment, and if environmental change INITIATES new species (which I think is “most likely”), it is a contradiction in terms to say that speciation appears BEFORE the environmental change.

DAVID: In looking at the bush of life, I've consistently given you the answer you fully know: energy for life to continue until humans are evolved.
dhw: I anticipated this non-explanation for God’s personal design of every lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct for the sake of humans, and have restored it in bold.
DAVID: We will never solve our difference here. You won't accept that God's purpose was humans.

I won’t accept that if God’s one and only purpose was to produce humans, he specially designed the weaverbird’s nest in order to fulfil that one and only purpose. When I point out the obvious illogicality of this scenario, you either revert to “balance of nature”, which merely means life continues, or you switch to “main purpose”, as under “Genome complexity”. But when challenged to tell us other possible purposes, your reply is:
DAVID: Main purpose is still main purpose. The phrase is to allow for other possible minor purposes, but each time I think about it, I don't find any.

Because you don’t want to find any. So you are stuck with your original precept that God’s only purpose was humans and everything else was related to that. God designed the weaverbird’s nest because he wanted to design humans. But apparently it all “fits together”.

dhw: I don't know why the whale, which you hold up as a shining example of your God's work, would have moved from land to water if it hadn't involved some kind of improvement, but in any case it provides a shining example of the interconnection between speciation and the environment.
DAVID: An animal cannot suddenly enter the water as a lifestyle without prior change. Speciation first to adapt to the new lifestyle environment brings.

The answer to that is that it doesn’t enter the water as a lifestyle. It enters the water to see if it can improve its lifestyle. And when it finds that its lifestyle improves, step by step it improves its adaptations – precisely as the video illustrates. No need for “prior change”.