Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, May 06, 2021, 13:01 (1087 days ago) @ David Turell

We change ecosystems
DAVID: Nations are competitors. You exhibit wishful thinking.

dhw: Then in order to avoid unimaginable catastrophe, nations will have to follow the pattern of evolution, which progresses not solely through competition but also through cooperation. [...] I can only hope that you are wrong.

DAVID: The purposefully widely unpublished current pause in warming is 6 1/2 years old, according to the satellites. Won't you wonder why? But I know about it, and where to find the info.

In this case, I hope you are right.

Brain and body sizes
dhw: […] I wish you would stop pretending that all my arguments against your illogical theories and in favour of logical alternatives stem from the fact that I am an agnostic, which you even pretend actually makes me an atheist. Why can’t you just stick to the arguments themselves?

DAVID: What a complaint!! I see mostly atheism in your arguments. Perhaps you really can't see that.

What an answer!! Rather than discuss the logic of arguments, you prefer to pretend that when I propose logical theistic theories different from your own, they can be dismissed because you regard my theistic theories as mostly atheistic!

A two-celled ancient fossil
DAVID: God's pre-planning designs allows using the same design again and again.

dhw: And according to you, every one of them is specially designed as “part of the goal of evolving [= specially designing] humans”. Doesn’t it make more sense to argue that different organisms will find similar solutions to similar problems? Only asking.

DAVID: One design leads to another. Simple repeatable plans make it easier for the designer.

dhw: ...if your God’s sole purpose was to design H. sapiens, how do you think his only goal (to design humans) was made “easier” by designing lots of life forms following similar plans, 99% of which had no connection with humans?

BATS
DAVID: […] how did the initial bats catch insects in flight to have enough food to survive. […] Only God's design of the species fits the facts. This is in addition to the fact bats are the only flying mammals with no known predecessor.

Do you expect to find a complete fossil record of every life form that ever existed? The first bat fossils go back 50 million years. Maybe 50.9 million years ago there were insect-eating mammals just embarking on flight experiments, though still getting food from the ground. What trace of you do you reckon will be found in 50 million years’ time?

Biological complexity:
QUOTE: "When these systems work properly, they can prevent cancer and drug resistance. […] When the pathways themselves fail, though, it can be bad news for the organism.”

DAVID: When DNA formed these protections had to be designed in place.

Did they? Which came first: disease or antidote? Evolution is the history of cells responding to new conditions by changing themselves, and changes survive if beneficial (natural selection) - in this case preventing disease. But you believe the antidote was designed by your God before the arrival of the disease. If so, why do “pathways” fail?

NEW FORMS REQUIRE NEW INFORMATION
QUOTE: […] Here, we validate that exon shuffling is a major evolutionary force generating genetic novelty, and we provide evidence that DNA transposons fuel the process not only by supplying protein domains to assemble new protein architectures, but also, in many cases, by introducing the splice sites that enable the fusion process. (David’s bold)

DAVID: … Where does the new necessary designing information come from? […]

The answer is in the bold. Transposons cause mutations by “shuffling” information around, and mutations create the novelties. But the word “mutation” is not synonymous with randomness! It just means change. So here’s a clue: the scientist who first proposed the existence of transposons was Barbara McClintock, a Nobel prizewinner who was a firm believer in cellular intelligence.

Bacteriophages weird genome
QUOTE: “The phage is trying to avoid being destroyed by the host,” he says. “This is really a protection mechanism for the phage.”

Another example of how even the simplest forms of life (if viruses count as life) can change themselves in order to improve their chances of survival.

DAVID: This is all part of the ecosystem between bacteria and bacteriophages. In my view all ecosystems are important in the natural balances they create. That is why I point out their importance and How they fit into the giant evolved bush of life. […]

I don’t suppose there is anyone on Earth who would deny that all organisms live in an ecosystem, which needs to be balanced and was/is part of the giant evolved bush of life. You are on safe (though obvious) ground. The problem arises when you tell us that all past ecosystems and life forms were “part of the goal of evolving [= specially designing] humans",although 99% of them had no connection with humans.

There is also a slightly strange dichotomy of thought between your awareness of the need for balance and the fact that human interference has already wrecked many individual ecosystems, and your refusal to acknowledge human activity as a possible global threat to the entire planet’s ecosystems.