Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, February 18, 2021, 11:16 (1155 days ago) @ David Turell

Evol: always advancing or not?

QUOTE: "[…] it calls into doubt whether true fitness maxima exist and, more broadly, it implies that directionality and progress in evolution may be illusory.'"

DAVID: Basically evolution can go back and forth, not steadily forward

dhw: But one would have thought that a God who, according to you, had just one purpose and was always in full control of evolution, would have moved steadily forward in his pursuit of his goal. Hence my repeating ad nauseam my question why you think he didn’t, and your ad nauseam insistence that it’s all logical though you have no idea why he would have fulfilled his purpose this way.

DAVID: My logic is God chose to evolve. He makes history and so that is logical.

Yes of course God, if he exists, must have chosen to set up the process of evolution, and yes of course he is responsible for the history of life. How does that explain your theory that he only had one purpose – to design H. sapiens – and proceeded to design anything but H. sapiens?

DAVID: The Darwinian article is discussing the viability of the 'fitness' theory, and finds evolution doesn't really fit it.

And “more broadly, it implies that directionality and progress in evolution may be illusory”. But you believe in directionality – because according to you every life form was “part of the goal of evolving humans”.

DAVID: God wanted us but was not at high speed over 3.8 billion years.

So your God had only one purpose, and was mighty slow in even beginning to fulfil it, and so he quickly designed millions of other life forms that had no connection with humans. You don’t think it might just be possible that he actually wanted to have the vast variety of life forms that preceded ours and had no connection with ours?

Extreme extremophiles

QUOTE: "Learning more about how the organisms have adapted to their freezing home far from food may also give us clues about how life evolved […]

DAVID: Just more evidence showing how tough life is, surviving everywhere.

dhw: It is truly amazing. Note that even you lay emphasis on survival as the prime purpose of life forms.

DAVID: Just the opposite!! Life is so tough it easily survives everywhere. As usual you are backwards in you thinking.

How does that come to mean that the prime objective of all life forms is not survival? Please tell us what other purpose these extreme extremophiles might have in “adapting to their freezing home”.

Physical change in speciation

dhw: ALL organisms are composed of cells, and even you believe in common descent. This means that throughout thousands of millions of years, cells have learned to cooperate and combine in forming one new structure after another. You believe these were divinely programmed or dabbled, but the cells would still have had to cooperate and combine, whether he did it or they did it for themselves. The PROCESS of restructuring is the same. Hardware/software is an unnecessary image. Of course all parts of the organism must function together if it is to survive. The great problem is how the ability of cells to reorganize themselves arose in the first place, which is the same as asking what is the origin of life. Nobody knows.

DAVID: We ID folks believe only a designer had to do it.

I know what you believe. Now please tell us why you ID folks consider it impossible for your designer to have designed a mechanism that would enable cells to do their own designing.

Chimps ‘r’ not us

dhw: Nobody ever said they were.

DAVID: We may have 98% similar bases with chimps but the 3-D DNA's are at least 78% different as discussed in our past entries.

dhw: Do you believe we are descended from apes or don’t you?

DAVID: Did you miss the point? Yes we descended, but we are not 98% the same as materialistic Darwinists tout.

You and the materialists still believe that we are descended from a common ape ancestor. So what is the new percentage meant to prove?

Immunity from Neanderthals

DAVID: A little interbreeding helped us sapiens folks. This has been discussed before when it was found that Neanderthal genes help our general immunity. This is a more specific case. dhw asked in the past why God would produce so many varieties of hominin/homo types and this result offers a reason.

dhw: No it doesn’t. If H. sapiens was the only species he wanted, and if he is always in total control of evolution, why this roundabout way of doing it? (In anticipation of your stock reply, no, I am not questioning God. I am questioning your interpretation of your hypothetical God's purpose and method in creating the evolutionary process.)

DAVID: I can only look at the real history and not question why God did it the way it appeared. It resulted in more sapiens immunity noting bad bugs were around.

I am not disputing the real history. For some reason, you always present your interpretation of history and God’s role in it as if it were a fact. It’s not. It’s a theory, and you refuse to question the logic of your theory.