Miscellany: gaps in evolution cause discontinuity (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 22, 2021, 19:17 (1040 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?

DAVID: 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: Why are you repeating this? Do you think every life form at every stage of its evolution should have visited the Grand Canyon and left a fossil? Do you think every life form at every stage of its evolution should have left a fossil in China, or in Canada, or anywhere else you can think of? It’s not just the Cambrian that’s the mystery. Speciation itself is a mystery. Nobody knows how it happens. And so all we can do is theorize: you with your divine 3.8-billion-year-old programme, or your divine dabbles, Darwin with his random mutations, Shapiro with his intelligent cells.

Your pure wishful thinking continues. Don't denigrate my Canyon experience. My point is the demarcation lines between eras/geologic periods is quite precise. You are not worried as Darwin was about the Cambrian and he also pointed out the 'plant bloom' in which angiosperms appeared out of nowhere. In most of the evolutionary record the gaps are small, as in whales. Those huge gaps exist and should make you uncomfortable.

dhw: I hope you will now stop pretending that Shapiro does not advocate evolution through cellular intelligence.

DAVID: All he proved was bacteria can edit DNA which be automatic.

dhw: No theory has been proven – if it had been, there would be no discussion. Meanwhile, I hope you will now stop pretending that I have “extrapolated” ideas which Shapiro does not propose himself.

Shapiro proposed a possible solution by self-editing DNA. I just presented some minor evidence that it happens for minor modification. Your extrapolation is evidenced in your miraculous 'cell intelligence theory' that can theoretically produce any design change.