New Miscellany Parts 1 &:2: evolution, zombies, tuning etc. (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 26, 2025, 21:09 (5 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving. Yes or no?

dhw: How many more times? NO! The 0.1% of survivors produced the species that are alive today.

DAVID: But where did the survivors come from? The extinct produced the survivors. Evolution is a living continuum.

dhw: Extinction must have gone on continuously even before we arrived to play havoc with nature: principal factors would have been changes in local conditions, lack of resources, and competition. But what you call "continuity" has also been shattered by at least 6 mass extinctions, which each wiped out the vast majority of species existing at the time. I keep quoting the dinosaur example, but you prefer not to be given examples and, for some reason, you simply cannot grasp the fact that once any species is extinct it becomes incapable of producing anything.Continuity is broken. Extinction means it’s not there anymore. It doesn’t exist. Something that doesn’t exist cannot produce anything! Where did the survivors come from? They came from their mummies and daddies, who were the same species as themselves: the species that did NOT go extinct!

When a species goes extinct leaving behind a new species from it, that is evolution, not your discontinuous form.

Zombification

DAVID: All ecosystems are intertwined and are therefore necessary for the whole Earth's living systems.

dhw: Still not an answer. Bearing in mind your belief that your God created all systems for the sole benefit of us humans, would you say that zombification is necessary for our existence and survival?

DAVID: It is part of an ecosystem as explained above. With all the articles produced here showing the delicacy of balances in nature you still don't get it. Remember reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone undid the damage done by humans removing them.

dhw: Every creature that ever lived has been “part of an ecosystem”, and ecosystems have constantly changed, and changes have constantly resulted in extinctions and the establishment of new ecosystems. We humans can destroy the balance, or restore the balance. But none of this means that your God specially created every ecosystem for the sole benefit of us humans, which is the theory you keep proposing and which makes absolutely no sense in the context of life’s history. That’s why you keep dodging the issue.

No dodge. We are here running everything as proof of the theory.

Camouflage caterpillar

DAVID: considering this bug changes to mush in becoming a flying insect, this learned behavior caries through the metamorphosis process. This certainly looks like learned behavior, but considering the complexity of cozying up to spiders it may well be designed.

dhw; I’m beginning to wonder just what you mean by “designed”. The strategy must have begun at some point. Maybe through an accident, an audacious experiment, but no matter how it started, it was successful and was therefore passed on to subsequent generations. This would clearly indicate a degree of awareness/intelligence. However, I suspect that rather than allow for autonomous intelligence, you have your God designing the strategy 3.8 billion years ago or, alternatively, popping down to Earth to give caterpillars courses in camouflage. Because otherwise, how would we humans survive?

Design means too complex for chance or your approach of tr1al and error involving basic survival as a result of it, doesn't work.