@ghost-of-a-duke saidA vision of omnipotence is hardly likely to be a static thing. How do you represent the possibility of being everything and anything. If we were in that image it would have to be within the remarkable potential carried in our DNA (and perhaps that was already in DNA as it moved things towards our existence). Who knows where it will end. If you had seen the single cell organisms you would hardly have predicted humanity? What is it that humanity will become if it is to be as different again?
I think you misread her post. She said:
'I don't happen to believe the concept that "God never changes".
@petewxyz saidI don't recognize anything as being omnipotent.
A vision of omnipotence is hardly likely to be a static thing. How do you represent the possibility of being everything and anything. If we were in that image it would have to be within the remarkable potential carried in our DNA (and perhaps that was already in DNA as it moved things towards our existence). Who knows where it will end. If you had seen the single cell organi ...[text shortened]... dly have predicted humanity? What is it that humanity will become if it is to be as different again?
@wolfgang59 saidThat's my point. New species have to come from somewhere, however, and there are different thoughts and theories as to how this happens. If two populations of the same species become isolated for say, ten million years, chances are that different adaptations to environment and so on will engender sufficient distinctions between the two populations to make them classifiable as two distinct species. They start off as the same thing and end up different. And I know that we've had a long thread somewhere about the 'punctuated equilibrium' theory, whereby by dint of some cataclysmic event, new characteristics (the neck of the giraffe for example) appear 'quickly' in species which makes them worthy of new classification, or it could just be by dint of a genetic mutation in one species, say a giraffe with a really long neck which does better for itself by reaching higher branches, breeds more successfully and becomes the dominant phenotype. You know how this works, I'm sure.
Surely one generation to the next will always be the same species!
Definitions of species in an evolutionary lineage are quite arbritary.
We are unique as a species. We've invented airplanes, which means that we can now get anywhere in the world very quickly. (Much quicker than ten million years, anyway, even with British Airways) Central heating and air - conditioning mean that any of us can now quite comfortably live anywhere, and so we do, and so we are busy about the business of interbreeding between previously isolated populations, it's a small world now. I also think that someone walking down Neasden High Street with a really long neck would probably be noticed. We self - analyse, we study ourselves and such, and so it's hard to see how any group of us could become so distinct from another group that we become classifiable as a different species. We adapt as a species, and adaptations are passed on from one generation to another anywhere and everywhere, the small distinctions quickly become blurred.
This is an interesting discussion, and we really don't need the exclamation marks, by the way.