An Alternative to Evolution: pt 2 (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Sunday, July 15, 2018, 04:49 (2112 days ago) @ dhw

I shall only respond to those comments not dealt with in my first post on this thread.

dhw: Tony has not spelt out his alternative theory, but it would seem to be God’s separate creation of the species. (He’ll correct me if I’m wrong.) Do you accept this as a reasonable alternative to common descent?

DAVID: Yes. I believe in theistic evolution.

Evolution is the very opposite of separate creation, and that is what caused all the furore at the time of Darwin’s book. Either you believe in evolution or you believe in separate creation!

TONY: Why would ANY designer reinvent the code every time they needed to do something similar?

dhw: A very good argument for common descent. Why would your God need to create each species separately (or do you have a different hypothesis?) if he has already devised a code that would lead to speciation?

DAVID: It is simpler to have all the information present from the beginning.

DHW:Tony hasn’t answered my question. I don’t find it “simpler” to have a complete programme for every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder installed in the very first cells, to be passed down through ever changing environments and through billions of generations and organisms, each one having to delete every programme except its own. But it would certainly be simpler to devise a code enabling organisms to work out their own way to cope with or exploit their environment.

Would it be easier to engineer a truck and then figure out what parts on the truck can be swapped out safely, or to engineer a piece of metal that could transform into whatever it needed to be to form every possible vehicle ever made? Personally, I think our categorization of species is likely to be 90 kinds of wrong, which is why we keep seeing things that don't line up in cladistics. The problem is that the criteria used to sort critters into species is subjective, based on the biases of what the researcher thinks is important. I am almost certain there is a more objective method, and that once found, it will eliminate most of this pointless arguing over common descent and speciation.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.