But how can we be so sure that there is any "natural selection" at all? Those new environmental conditions could also be part of the design, like a cook deciding to increase the temperature of the oven, adding more salt or whatever. Sometimes the meal goes wrong, and they do discard it.
I think we can be sure there is natural selection - it just gets elevated to an unrealistic degree by Darwinists. For example, read the section in
Darwin Devolves about the Galapagos finches. All natural selection means is that organisms with certain traits can no longer survive in their environment for whatever reason. It could be as simple as a particularly harsh winter. And accidents can cause extinctions, like a volcano or meteor explosion.
As for new environmental conditions which are themselves designed, I agree, kind of. But I don't think it's as
direct as a cook increasing the temperature. Lifeforms themselves seem to have terraformed the planet, creating different chemical conditions and affecting environments in various ways to support new forms of life that couldn't have existed in the previous conditions. Changes like that could be planned in the sense of a desired progression from "World A" to "World B", etc. Basically, "OK, we need more oxygen now, so we need to make these kinds of organisms." The conditions change drastically, and then it's a matter of just watching to see which parts still work and which don't. The ones that don't will die off. Parts can be reused, or maybe those forms serve no purpose in the new phase of life.
But even those life forms that go extinct did work in the time they had. A truly bad design wouldn't survive long enough to appear in the fossil record. The very fact that they do shows that they were doing
something right in the conditions in which they found themselves. They found a niche in the total biosphere; they fulfilled a purpose in those specific conditions. But conditions and purposes change, and some that were previously useful can become obsolete, just like with human businesses and technology.
So if we use the cooking analogy, the meal is always edible, but it gets tastier (more complex) with time, and certain ingredients that were useful and interesting in the early stages don't work so well over time, so that to reintroduce them would actually make the meal worse.
Why wouldn't it be possible that they aren't different specific creations with similar "parts", not linked in a linear fashion, via degradation and natural selection? A degradative mutation implies that the organism is worse off. However, none of those animals are worse off than the others within their environment, and continue to live and reproduce within their group. Haven't finished all Behe yet, so maybe I'm missing something.
Yeah, it is possible. I'm primarily going off what Behe proposes. Here are some quotes:
Species and genus classifications seem ephemeral likely because they are based on accidental attributes - on the caprice of random mutation and natural selection - which can arise through any number of serendipitous paths. Classifications at the level of family and beyond, on the other hand, are much more well grounded, because they very likely are based - directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously - on the apprehension of a purposeful arrangement of parts, that is, on aspects of the intentional design of the organism. ...
What variation can exist within a family? For the dog family, it's the difference between a domestic dog and a wolf and a fox. For the cat family, it's the difference between a lion and a leopard and a lynx. ... That degree of variation can likely be achieved by random mutation and natural selection. What is the difference between members of two separate families? For birds, it's the difference between a swift and a hummingbird, or a woodpecker and a toucan, or a thrush and a starling. For mammals it's the difference between a cat and a dog, or a rat and a muskrat, or a porpoise and a narwhal. If my argument is correct, those differences required explicit design.
I couldn't find another quote I was looking for. I'm pretty sure at one point he said that he thought it was possible that SOME genera and species can be designed. But I did find another quote where he talks about humans (which he sees as needing intelligent design, even if they're classified as Hominidae), and that giraffes and okapis seem too different to be a result of RM/NS. So he wonders if perhaps they shouldn't be considered members of the same family.
And one of his main points in the book is that degradative changes don't necessarily make organisms worse off. They may 'break' genes, but they do so in a way that makes them better adapted to their environments:
It's quite reasonable to think, then, that degradative mutations can help organisms to adapt and in the process can sometimes shift them into new minor categories of genus and species. At some level, however, new positive additional genetic information is needed to differentiate one category of organism from another, and family seems a strong candidate for that level.
Later in the book, he gives several examples of how degradative mutations do this.
Possible. And maybe the short wave cycle is important, as the Cs mentioned, for intensive learning. Consciousness gets "heavier" (for lack of a better word) as the organism learns over and over again, and at some point, it is ready to reincarnate into a different set of genetics, a different body. Like when the Cs said that soul and genetics marry. But within one life, the organism stays within the body that it was given. I.e., just because, say, a doggie learns a lot in his interaction with good humans in this life, he cannot become something else within the same life span. He will still be a dog till his death. But on his next life, he may reincarnate as a 3D being if he's ready to learn 3D lessons. And that's one of the reasons why I think it is so ridiculous for some people to claim they are ready to graduate, that they don't belong in this world, etc. When there is so much to learn, and when the more you learn the more you realize you don't know, it's pure hubris and ignorance to think we're ready for something else. That comes when it comes, just like going to 4th grade comes when we've learned the syllabus from 3rd grade.
