Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Monday, April 12, 2021, 16:44 (1112 days ago) @ dhw

Survival

dhw: Survival of what must be guaranteed? Obviously evolution can’t continue if every single life form is dead. Is that what you mean? Even if it is, how can you say that the purpose of each and every new design is to guarantee survival but the purpose of each and every life form is not to fulfil the quest for survival?

Just opposite: species survive because of God's designs. Survival struggles do not drive evolution.

Cambrian
QUOTE: What they found is truly mind-blowing. The window of time between the latest appearance date (LAD) of the alien Ediacaran biota and the first appearance date (FAD) of the complex Cambrian biota was only 410,000 years. You read that correctly, just 410 thousand years! This is not an educated guess but based on very precise radiometric U-Pb dating with an error margin of only plus-minus 200 thousand years.

DAVID: whatever the Ediacarans were, they were extremely simple. The Cambrians were full-blown animals with organ systems. This short Cambrian gap destroys Darwin's theoretical gradual approach in viewing how evolution worked. Designer required.

dhw: 410,000 years based on a very precise dating method with an error margin of only 50%. This is a remarkable definition of precise! Folk keep saying what a short time this is. I would suggest that half a million years (let’s compromise) is ample time for intelligent beings (cell communities) to adapt to and exploit new conditions by developing new organs. I agree that design is required, but (theistic version) I see no reason why your God should be incapable of designing a mechanism capable of achieving this within the thousands of generations of organisms born in half a million years. Do you?

DAVID: You've skipped over the gap in complexity, and it is a short time when the whole history of evolution is reviewed. Of course God did it.

dhw: I haven’t skipped over it. I’m saying I don’t see why thousands of generations of intelligent organisms (with God as the possible source of their intelligence) should not be able to develop the new organs required or made possible by new conditions. Do you think your God is incapable of inventing cellular intelligence?

Cellular intelligence is represented by the instructions God gave to cells so they will function in a way that creates life.

Monkey ‘talk’

DAVID: Newly discovered monkey call meanings with a predator nearby:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2274135-female-monkeys-call-to-males-when-they-see...

DAVID: Not at all surprising. Even very early erectus 'language' was much more nuanced than that.

dhw: Of course it’s not surprising. What is surprising is that anyone should even think that any life form could exist without having some form of communication, and that anyone should even think that our ancestors did not use sounds to convey meanings which would eventually develop into our own modern languages.

Agreed, but only we have have true complex language.