Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 24, 2021, 09:05 (1131 days ago) @ David Turell

Possums
DAVID: The bold still has possums talking. Dead possum trick still has to be taught by demonstration.

dhw: I’m quite happy to include demonstration as one means of communication whereby the trick eventually became standard practice. So why do you think your God had to preprogramme the trick or teach it?

DAVID: Individual demonstration takes time and is dangerous to the teacher wo has to time it just right..

This is getting really silly. When Pete the possum played dead and survived, do you honestly think he then asked the family to come and watch (perhaps even leaving themselves exposed), while the next eagle circled the sky above? We don’t know exactly how our fellow creatures pass on information – we only know that they do, through methods that include demonstration, sounds, gestures, chemicals etc. We don’t speak their “languages”. But I really wonder how many of your fellow ID-ers believe that animals are incapable of devising and disseminating their strategies of survival, and that God must have preprogrammed possums and the play-dead trick 3.8 billion years ago, or that he gave possums courses in how to play dead and has gone on doing so because they are incapable of passing the information on to others. But do please tell us how else you think your God might get the message to all possums. (The rest of this section deals with the same subject, so I’ll move on.)

Penguins
DAVID: When penguins took to water for food, they had to develop webbed feet and other characteristics. My thought is God helped with these designs.

My thought is that just like the whales, when penguins took to water, the cell communities used their perhaps God-given intelligence to cooperate in restructuring parts of the body. I’m delighted to see that you think they “had to develop webbed feet” etc. Very different from your theory that your God operated on pre-whale legs to turn them into flippers BEFORE the pre-whale entered the water.