Survival could however select for the creatures best “engineered” for changing environments. Engineered, I understand, supposes that an “engineer” designed and built the creature. I don’t mean that. What I do mean is that “design improvements” have often been the unintended result of evolution ie. teeth gradually replacing the shell like “teeth” in fish over time. Over time, you can follow an amphibian to reptile and mammal like reptile to mammals and dinosaurs. It happened through incremental steps over long periods of time. A million years is a long time and a lot can happen over that period. We’ve only been around in our current form for some 200,000 years and preceding species very similar to us go back 2.6 my. Before that is still unclear exactly who is in our line though we can have a good idea but not proof currently. We find more fossils and things become clearer.
It is this layman’s opinion that “time” and natural selection do not explain the current state.
Simply take any complex creature having: a brain, heart, lungs, waste/circulatory/nervous systems, eyes, ears, nose, and a skeletal structure. Then extrapolate backwards to a mass of simple, single-celled organisms.
Ah! One of the simple organisms mutates! The very first cell towards an eventual eyeball. Another mutates! And the first step towards a heart begins.
And yet, we know that neither of the above mutations is in any way helpful to the organism; the extra “eyeball” cell doesn’t help the cell to “see”, the extra “heart” cell doesn’t provide for better circulation - because there isn’t any circulation.
Take every system in our body; without a functioning system to begin with, mutations have nothing to aid.
Am I missing something? Please explain to me how ‘mutations + time’ give us a new bodily system/function.
No, things don;t become clearer. We’ve unearthed vast quantities of dirt and fossils over the last 150 years, and the fossil record is exactly Huxley what feared it might be. You can assume there were billions of happy accidents that added new genetic material, were not terminal mutations, and gradually built up new species, that time cures all. But I don’t have that kind of blind faith. Neither do the myriad macro-evolutionists who admit natural selection is not a sufficient cause and there must be something else. A fairy tale with complex terminology is still a fairy tale, after all.
No, things don;t become clearer. We’ve unearthed vast quantities of dirt and fossils over the last 150 years, and the fossil record is exactly what Huxley feared it might be. You can assume there were billions of happy accidents that added superfluous new genetic material, were not terminal mutations as usually occurs, gradually built up new species, and that time cures all. But I don’t have that kind of blind faith. Neither do the myriad macro-evolutionists who admit natural selection is not a sufficient cause and there must be something else. A fairy tale with complex terminology is still a fairy tale, after all.