Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 15, 2021, 19:22 (1109 days ago) @ dhw

Survival

DAVID: God's purpose is to advance evolutionary steps to reach us. Survival must be guaranteed so each step survives until the next step is designed from it.

dhw:...And somehow this means that he specially designs the innovations to enable them to survive (until they die), but he does NOT specially design their innovations to enable them to survive (until they die). Bewildering!

Sorry about your confusion. Is evolution stepwise as more complexity appears? Each step sets up the appearance of the next step. Perfectly sensible

Survival in bacteria

DAVID: No direct time relationship, with a gap of 64 million years, but a stepwise design relationship through evolution, which you inexplicably constantly avoid recognizing.

dhw: Are you now telling us that your God organized a step-by-step direct line between the brontosaurus (plus food supply) and us (plus food supply)? Not to mention any one of the other 99% of specially designed and extinct life forms plus food supplies. This really will cause a sensation in the scientific world.

Each new step is an advance from the older steps. All steps required. Until you recognize this necessity you will remain confused.

How reliable is science? Radioactive dating
dhw: I like the heading you have given to this thread! You never commented on the hilarious entry the other day under Cambrian:
“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.”

dhw: Very precise, with an error margin of only 50%!

DAVID: Precise enough to make the point, sticking a dagger into the heart of Darwin's gradualism, recognized by Gould who pointed out all the unexplained large gaps in Darwin's tree.

dhw: I was simply giving an example of scientific "reliability". Gradualism is relative. The theory of cellular intelligence “drives a dagger” into the heart of those who claim that half a million years (thousands of generations) is not enough time for new organs to evolve, and therefore they must have been intelligently designed by God. Intelligence could have done it in the time allowed. And now we have the possibility that intelligence did indeed do the designing – namely that of intelligent cells which could have been designed by your God.

The study going back 540 million years about was +/- 200,000 years which means the gap was 200,000 years to 600,000 years, a tiny amount of time to bring all the complex Cambrians into existence , just as Darwin fussed about it, noting no precursors. All you have done is talk around it with no answers.

Our special gait
DAVID: No other biped walked/walks as we do:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-steps-book-bipedalism-human-evolution-anatomy...

DAVID: No question, we are unique in so many ways not explained by any natural theory of evolution. This is only one aspect of our bodies' unusual postures and and our unusual dexterity of how we can make our bodies move.

dhw: Yes, we are unique, and we are the product of many stages of evolution. I doubt if any evolutionist would disagree. Why do we have to keep repeating this? The controversy in our own discussions concerns your insistence that this means we were your God’s only purpose, and he specially designed every other life form and food bush “as part of the goal of evolving (= specially designing) humans” (plus food bush).

Yes, you find my view of God's works as controversial. I'm not surprised.