Miscellany: gaps in evolution cause discontinuity (General)

by David Turell , Monday, June 21, 2021, 18:10 (1042 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Make a fun point. My background in geology is what I illustrated. Our Geology professor guide taught us three semesters of geology in nine days.

dhw: Happy to have a bit of fun. Did he tell you that God personally designed every living form de novo “as part of the goal of evolving [= designing] humans” plus lunch, and this is proven by the fact that the Grand Canyon does not contain a complete record of every life form that ever lived?

DAVID: Saw lots of fossils.

dhw: Good for you. And what did they prove?

Fossils come in discrete layers representing old ages in time. The layers have fossils or not. In Cambrian and Edicaran eras no transitional forms are found. The jump is complexity is enormous, ever since Darwin times, no matter how many fossils are found, many in the past 30 years in the Edicaran with no change in the complexity gap..

dhw: Neither he [Shapiro] nor I use the words “brilliant committees”. He says that cells are cognitive beings which produce “evolutionary novelty” by means of self-modification. I wish you would stop pretending this doesn't mean intelligent cells were responsible for speciation.

DAVID: You make it sound as if cell committees drive evolution. Pure theory which I wish was that simple to answer. My answer is the complexity of design requires a designing mind.

dhw: We don’t use your word “committee”, but yes, like every other theory of speciation, including yours, it is unproven. It is perfectly compatible with your “answer”: God can be the designer of cellular intelligence, just as you think he designed the human brain, which autonomously comes up with complex designs of its own.

DAVID: […] I've disagreed before: God does not do secondhand creation.

dhw: Your usual statement of blinkered opinion as if it were a fact.

DAVID: I should have written 'my' God. Yours does.

dhw: Mine remains a theory, not a rigid belief. And I hope you will now stop pretending that Shapiro does not advocate evolution through cellular intelligence.

All he proved was bacteria can edit DNA which be automatic