Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 05, 2021, 22:31 (996 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You've got it!!! The latter portion of your comment is exactly what God did!

dhw: And now at last it seems that you’ve got it too. Your God did NOT plant instructions for every new antibody, which can only mean that cells have the autonomous ability to process new information, make decisions and create new antibodies without any intervention from him.

No. God gave the cells the ability to recognize invading foreign proteins, and add to them a poisoning addition to kill them. The cells are fully programmed to do this.

dhw: Please don’t backtrack. If you do, I shall quote you.

You deliberately changed your version again. My initial response above was to see if you would weasel out of your initial remarks. I'm still with God's programming cells recognition and response, as described above.

dhw: So you agree that legs changing to flippers helped pre-whales to survive, but apparently legs changing to flippers do not advance speciation! The same argument, then, for every adaptation/innovation that “helped survival”. If speciation happens when parts of the body are changed, and if the changes help those organisms to survive, how can you possibly believe that “helping survival doesn’t advance speciation”?

DAVID: Interesting word game. God obviously makes flippers as part of a new species, built for survival. Survival of the fittest did not make a new species, God did..

dhw: It is you who are playing word games. A purpose doesn’t “make” anything! The purpose of the flippers was to improve the animal’s chances of survival. This and other such changes caused speciation. It is absurd to argue that the purpose of a change is not the reason for the change. Speciation happens because life forms change in the quest for survival, whether God makes the changes or the cells do it themselves.

The bold is your usual scurry back to pure unproven Darwinism. Living creatures like living and try to survive. That is all the quest for survival can tell us about evolution..

Retinal design allows prediction of movement
dhw: We have no idea how long it would have taken the dog to develop its extraordinary sense of smell. But it is totally absurd to expect to find fossils of every single stage of dog-nose development. Now please answer my question – do you think your God stepped in to adjust the different degrees of vision, hearing and smell?

DAVID: Design means a complex plan is formed all at once, and cannot be stepwise.

dhw: You are tying yourself in knots. According to you, your God spent 3.8 billion years changing simple bacteria step by step into complex humans (not to mention all the other steps as he specially designed every other branch of life that had nothing to do with humans).

Dragging in the wrong response, as usual. Please discuss the meaning of design for the future, the point of my comment.

Balance of nature: importance of ecosystems
DAVID: when humans change the top predator by bringing in foreign animals, the ecosystem falls part. The giant bush of life is made of of many thousand such systems, which should not be disturbed.

dhw: You are so right. Humans are the most destructive of all animals, and we are currently in the process of destroying both our environment and ourselves.

And some of us elect the stupid politicians who are doing it. But I might add, trying to change the current natural environmental responses is trying to change Mother Nature. Impossible