I suppose my point is that yes, there is evidence of abrupt changes, but since NS needs gradual change to be feasible, the real question is what mechanism can replace NS as the main driving force of evolution - 'dynamics' seems a bit vague!
As things stand I think the Intelligent Design crowd have a really strong case (athough I don't see Yaweh as a super nerdy biochemist!) because the minimal amount of mechanism needed for life to exist, is obviously quite large - even if we try to imagine a pre-DNA, pre-RNA biochemistry, and there doesn't seem to be any physical law that would create it.
An abrupt change resulting from a shuffling of exons can only produce something viable if the structure of those exons actually anticipated a future shuffle - which really means it must have been designed - like the air bag mechanism in a car is designed to come into use only in specific circumstances.
However if the physical world really is inside our mind, isn't it extremely likely that intelligence has been involved in the creation of the structure we encounter as 'reality'?
Again, I know there may be political reasons why you would not want to explore those ideas in public.
David
Hi again, David!
LOL! All of my writing is publicly and freely available so, no, there are no political hangups with what I say in public.
There are many different ways to approach your comments. First a couple specific things:
> NS needs gradual change to be feasible. Darwinian evolution is a qualitative idea. As such it is infinitely flexible and there is no such constraint that it be gradual. Now, when I say it is a qualitative idea, that is actually a major dis. The same cannot be said, for example, about quantum mechanics, which is a precise mathematical model of a unique and specific structure. As such, QM has very specific constraints and anything violating those constraints will not match with physical measurements.
> 'dynamics' seems a bit vague. No, exactly the opposite. Go to amazon and type "dynamics" in the book search and you will find many text books. Dynamics is a branch of physics with very specific and detailed content. It is an extremely interesting topic.
Those little nit picks said, you really raise many interesting and complicated points all at once.
Let me first put on my scientist hat and pretend I am a pure physicalist. One of the legitimately hot topics in physics and chemistry is reaction networks. This is both experimental and theoretical work. There have been ideas since at least the 1960s that reaction networks are the basis for how life evolved. You can see this in classical biochemistry where the center of cell function is a series of cyclical reaction networks with names like Kreb's cycle, TCA cycle, and so forth. These are examples of non-equilibrium chemistry...of chemical systems that form only when energy is input into the system, and maintained only as long as energy is supplied to the system.
One can imagine how such simple organic chemical networks were the first structures to form, and over billions of years, more complex structures were build on top of these.
So, at this point, there are imaginable mechanisms by which life could spontaneously evolve, being powered by the Sun and geo energy sources.
Let me take of my physicalists' hat now. The one thing that no physical mechanism can explain is consciousness. Any well-informed intellectual will concede that the only way to put consciousness in the picture is by assuming it was there all along. This viewpoint is also supported by the mass of findings in neuroscience. The mind/body problem is just as unsolved today as it has been at any point in history.
So, the obvious conclusion is that, here in the West, we by no means have all of the picture at hand. Instead, at this level, we have a number of seemingly conflicting views: materialism, idealism, panpsychism, etc. Ideas that are familiar to people on this discussion board.
Well then...what is one to do? If one is to be totally honest, it has to be admitted that we just don't know.
This is why I have studied such a broad range of topics. What I have found to distinguish the various world views is how inclusive they are. It makes a spectrum from very inclusive to not very inclusive. I am inclined to go with the viewpoints that accept as much as is tenable under their umbrella. And that is why I have ended up at Hinduism and more specifically yoga. Particularly with respect to understanding the nature of the mind, the Hindu ideas have so much more to offer than Western science, religion, and philosophy. The major difference between Hinduism and Western ideas is that Hinduism points inward, meaning inward with respect to the mind, and the Western ideas are generally focused outward towards the world (materialism) or God (Western religions).
Reading the Hindu teachings, they are consonant with ID ideas, but much more flexible in their approach. Meaning, they don't contradict or fight with any scientific concepts, but tend to embrace and extend them. Hence, the directions I've gone with respect to the questions you raise are mostly Hindu.
The Hindus teach existence is an eternally appearing and disappearing multiverse made of uncountable universes (which I have been referring to as the Relative). At least 2000 years ago, they were talking about how this multiverse exists for some trillions of years. They talk about processes that are now translated in the West as "evolution" and "involution". Evolution and involution are complimentary processes whereby the Absolute generates the Relative (evolution), and the Relative eventually redissolves back into the Absolute (involution). One cycle of this is the life of a multiverse.
The multiverse is complex beyond our wildest dreams and imaginations. In fact, everything we can possibly imagine is but an infinitely small slice of the multiverse. The whole thing is ordered in a fashion beyond our human understanding, but what we can understand is that it is perfect beyond anything we can imagine. Leibniz kind of deduced this fact when he logically realized we live in the best of all possible worlds. It is beyond the ability of an average human to understand how such perfect organization can arise and manifest. The best we can do is make little metaphors that give us some sense of the forces and factors at work.
Given this picture, I can say that your intuitions and hunches are much more on the track of the truth than someone who wishes to believe that dead matter some how spontaneously and randomly organized to form conscious beings like us. I think the closest metaphor to understand how the Relative comes into being is akin to how a painting comes into being. There is a plan, and image beforehand, then the material is properly organized to manifest the image. This is quite like the ID picture, but I think more precise. I am skipping a huge amount of detail to keep this understandable.
So, that's about my main thoughts on this. I'd be happy to go into more detail if you wish, but will close here for now. Thanks again for the interesting conversation, David!
Best wishes!
Don