New Oxygen research; abundance and Cambrian (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 08, 2019, 09:30 (1816 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The oxygen levels were very important factors in allowing the diversification of new forms, but there is an underlying evolutionary driving mechanism which is the real cause of the new animals. Note my bolds about oxygen which tends to blur this point. The final bold above makes the point of how sloppy the authors have been in describing the role of oxygen. Oxygen allows the newly designed form to appear, but does not initiate anything. Again, a Darwinism slant in the reporting.

dhw: Of course there is an underlying mechanism, but that does not contradict the author’s emphasis on the importance of the environment. You could not have a clearer example of the way in which many of us believe evolution works: as the environment changes, organisms may need to change their structures in order to survive (= adaptation), or they may exploit the new conditions to invent new structures (innovation). […]
DAVID: It is the underlying mechanism of your comment that is at issue. I view it as much more active than your passive approach of changing environment pushing the animals to change.

This is not a passive process! It is the very opposite! Environmental change either demands or allows new actions. Survival depends on active change (= adaptation), and innovation depends on inventiveness, which is even more active. The changed environment is the trigger for action – passivity in most cases will result in extinction. According to you, however, organisms do absolutely nothing apart from magically turning on the one special programme passed down by the very first cells for every single change or, alternatively, lying/sitting there while your God performs his operations or delivers his lectures on how-to-do-it.

DAVID: The hippopotamus makes a major point:
The Hippo is a creature that has been around for a very long time. There is evidence to suggest they walked on the Earth more than 55 million years ago. The closest relatives of the Hippo are whales and porpoises. There are fossils that have been located in Africa that are dated back about 16 million years ago. They have been analyzed on many levels to give us some insight about Hippo evolution.
https://www.hippoworlds.com/hippopotamus-evolution/

And they still have four legs despite all that time in water, It is obviously something besides environment that guides development of new forms and major modifications.

There is no need to tell us that every species is different, and of course there is “something” which develops the new forms to cope with or exploit the new environment. I propose cellular intelligence, and you propose ye ancient computer programme or dabbling. Once an organism has found a means of survival that enables it to cope with its environment, there is no need for it to change. Hence bacteria from the year dot. Some organisms remain the same (hippo), whereas others may find means of improving their chances of survival by producing new structures for themselves (whales). In your own mish-mush of hypotheses, you simply have your God organizing the same process – his programmes and dabbles result in different ways of coping with or exploiting the environment (or of course not coping, and going extinct), but you have the anatomical changes taking place before the environmental changes.