The truth about evolution

People desperate for the bible to be right dont either?

Yes kind of but: the philosopher Roy Bhaskar talked about emergent levels in the sciences, i.e. physics gives rise to chemistry but chemistry can't be explained by physics, chemistry gives rise to biology but biology can't be explained by it, etc. I take your point about the lower sentience present in some animals, but I would suggest that the development of fully self-aware consciousness is a new level of function. We are not only able to self-manage as you suggest, but we are able to consider meaning beyond ourselves, abstractions, and bring that perception to the universe itself. What is the evolutionary advantage in asking 'who made me' or 'is there life on Mars'. Or it's just incidental, that this universe came into being, then developed consciousness which can question itself and its origins.

The devolution of an evolution discussion: talking about animals (flies) that land and walk on poo. The rest of the animals get their nose right down into p (ammonia) and poo (e.coli), eating by assimilating the odor.

Obviously a discussion on evolution need be limited to civilized people (intelligent people) and their progress. The simple masses must be excluded.

So nothing contains within itself the reason for its own existence.

Hence the need for God to kick things off, God being eternal.

This forum is autistic and has given me cancer.

Why is it new. Look at brains of lower mammals. There are no big qualitative differences. It suggests continuum. And what you say could have been biproducts. I can see alot of survival in our ability to think abstractlt; make causal inferences, make tools, create complex long term plans, live in strong effective social groups. Language too. They are the same processes that allow us to ask those questions which by themselves dont necessarily need survival value if they are biproducts. And remember nothing objectively has survival value. Its context dependent.

Consciousness for me is just the natural extension of perception needed to make adjustments to survive. It neednt be a black box.

jokes aside i'm in the process of reading it for the first time

it's honestly incredibly how so many things he had only a vague or non-existent conception of (mendelian inheritance, ecological niches) have been corroborated by modern biology. He drew on hypotheses that we're only just now realizing were correct that we believed were erroneous for the entire 20th century, namely Lemarckian blending occurring via transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

Read at least Origin of Species so you can know what he actually says. He did good science, which may I mention is the unifying theory of all life sciences.