How much of Evolution is shaped by history vs underlying constraints?

[Roy (Roy (Listener twice correct))]

@RTBsupporter

@Bill_II

Why not exactly? DNA provides the repository for the archetype and the secondary causes that result in the changes that get expressed. The very things Owen couldn’t explain.

Explanatory power was not the issue. It was lack of evidence for these laws and mechanisms that would support his theory. Back then, there was no quantum physics or even laws of thermodynamics that would have supported his theory.

For anyone who is wondering, all four of the laws of thermodynamics were formulated before Owen wrote his book on archetypes, though they were not yet so named.

@Bill_II

We find a hint of that supernatural Being’s work in the Bible, which indicates that God employs mass extinction and mass speciation events so as to ensure that at the moment God creates humans, Earth is endowed with a maximal level and diversity of life.

Which certainly looks like “God did it” and to which I was responding. So no straw manning present.

It also looks wrong (to me, anyway).

It’s possible that there was more diversity of life 66mya, when the Chicxulub impact occurred, than there was at the origin of humans, because there was at least 77my of increasing diversity during the Cretaceous before the drastic reduction at the end of it - and possibly 135my depending on the nature of the Jurassic/Cretaceous transition - which is longer than the period of increasing diversity afterwards.

[Roy (Roy (Listener twice correct))]

@Jay313

A list of things I will never bother to read:
…
Should I go on?

You could add ‘any source cited by RTBsupporter or his colleagues, except for the purposes of demonstrating that they have misrepresented it’.

Cf. the three-step method for refuting creationists.