New Miscellany Parts 1 &:2: evolution, eco, intelligence. (General)

by dhw, Sunday, April 27, 2025, 11:20 (4 days ago) @ David Turell

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!

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

So apparently, just before the brontosaurus died, it gave birth to a brand new species which was already equipped with all the changes necessary to survive the conditions that had just killed its mother. (Or, since birds are the only known descendants from dinosaurs, the brontosaurus gave birth to an egg.) What you cannot imagine is that a small number of species might have survived the new conditions, and these survivors went on to produce our ancestors. In other words: you believe our ancestors descended from the 99.9% of species that were wiped out, and not from the 0.1% of species that survived. And that is why, when I asked if you believed we and our food were descended directly from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived, you answered: “No. From the 0.1% surviving.” Please, please, please stop contradicting yourself!

A start of multicellularity

DAVID: I’ll stick with my God.

The longer you stick with your theories about your God, the more you will continue to contradict yourself.

Zombification

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

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.

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

We are here now, which apparently proves that for 3.X billion years, your God produced and culled millions of species and econiches for our benefit, although we were not here and they are no longer here either.

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?

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

I accept that these strategies, like all our organs, are too complex for chance. In view of your acceptance that bacteria are autonomously intelligent, it seems self-evident to me that their response to our efforts to kill them must be a matter of trial and error, since so many of them die before they find the correct formula to outwit us. I suspect the same applies to other life forms and also strategies, but I am happy to accept the possibility that some strategies might work first time. I certainly find that more convincing than the alternative explanations I have bolded above.