Innovation and Speciation: aquatic mammals avoid bends (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 03, 2020, 12:11 (1241 days ago) @ David Turell

Denton
dhw: It is perfectly logical that mammals entering the water may have been necessitated by a threat to survival.

DAVID: Survival is a theory that has no direct answer, except the huge improbability of of physiological and phenotypical design requirements. Unfortunately for your theory, each fossil in the whale series shows an enormous gap in the requirements. I can't imagine the land mammals jumped into the water at the shoreline and stayed there. Assuming a slow adaptation where are the transitional forms?

You expect there to be a complete fossil record of every stage of every life form from bacteria to humans, going back 3+ thousand million years. You know for yourself that every ancient fossil find is greeted with loud trumpeting because fossils are so rare. But various transitional forms have been found in the whale record. In any case, you should bear in mind your own theory that your God used existing species to form new species (common descent). Each change has to work, and each “transitional” form is a fully-fledged organism in its own right. We agree that Darwin was wrong when he said that Nature doesn’t make jumps. But what I propose (theistic version) is that instead of your God preprogramming or dabbling the jumps, he gave cell communities the intelligence to work them out for themselves. None of this in any way disproves the proposal that speciation (including that of humans) may be the result of organisms improving their chances of survival when faced with new conditions. These may be local as well as global.

Cichlids
dhw: The gaps in speciation are caused by the gaps between changes to the environment or the gradual exhaustion of existing niches, which would require exploitation of different niches.

DAVID: Gould's gaps were huge changes in phenotype and physiological processes. These are tiny variations in a family of fish.

Explained above.

Genome complexity
Quote: "In general, cells use similar working mechanisms from a common ancestor. They all learned the same tricks as long as these tricks were useful.'"

DAVID: Cells tricks are quite simple and automatic.

dhw: I’m referring to those that are complex and require intelligence.

DAVID: Even Shapiro doesn't go that far. All He has found is bacteria can edit DNA, and stay the same species.

dhw: How many more times? Shapiro DOES go that far. The fact that his research is on bacteria does not stop him from using the research of his fellow scientists! Here are his conclusions:
SHAPIRO: Cells are built to evolve; they have the ability to alter their hereditary characteristics rapidly through well-described natural genetic engineering and epigenetic processes as well as by cell mergers. […} Evolutionary novelty arises from the production of new cell and multicellular structures as a result of cellular self modification functions and cell fusions.
All quoted by you, p. 142, The Atheist Delusion.

DAVID: A theoretical proposal based on bacterial editing DNA.

Do you really think he didn’t incorporate the research of his fellow scientists?

DAVID: No further advances from anyone since his book appeared.

What advances do you expect? He has formulated his theory. Maybe one day, scientists will see cells producing innovations. Maybe one day, according to you, scientists will discover God’s book of instructions for all life forms, econiches, strategies and natural wonders in the history of life.

Bird beak
QUOTE: "A “sixth sense” feature might have helped carnivorous theropods such as Neovenator find prey by probing their snouts into mud or murky water."

DAVID: If the prey is remote, how does the animal know what it is looking for? Seems it had to be designed for use.

dhw: I would suggest that it doesn’t know what it is looking for but, like the therapods, is “sniffing out” what is available. Only the bird’s beak has the same “sniffability” as the therapods’ snouts.

DAVID: How does it develop if it doesn't know at first what is out there and what to sense?

Now you’re asking how an organism knows what to eat and how to go and get it. Maybe Mummy and Daddy gave it a few lessons. And maybe great-great-great grandma and grandpa learned from experience.