I’m telling you “a somewhat indiscriminate willingness to adopt” addresses both genetic and non-genetic adoptions: it produces favorable outcomes when it results in genetic adoptions, and non-favorable outcomes when it results in non-genetic adoptions, but that’s good enough – and it’s the same overly broad trait both times.
By analogy: say you see a dog humping enthusiastically away on a table leg, or a guest’s leg, or whatever. You ask: why is he doing this? I answer: he really likes to hump things. You ask why. I tell you it often enough produces favorable outcomes by resulting in procreation, such as when it leads him to vigorously hump a female canine in heat. You point out that vigorously humping a man’s leg produces no such outcome. I tell you it’s the same trait, which manifests sometimes in reproductive behaviors and sometimes is nothing more than – well, call it “barking up the wrong tree”. The same overly broad trait sticks around so long as it results in enough favorable outcomes to outweigh the non-favorable ones.
Why? Evolution exists. Benevolence exists, and is useful to organisms even when it’s overly broad. Mutations appear, and do so in increasing numbers as the timeframe expands – whereupon they spread or die out according to evolutionary utility, which benevolence has. You say the alleged improbabilities of that possibility are so high as to approach science fiction, and so you postulate an entity with attributes too far-out for most science fiction – and who, for all we know, is even less probable according to whatever different laws of physics he theoretically operates within.
If, in the worst-case scenario, it’s “science of the gaps” versus “god of the gaps”, I of course (a) see no reason for you to claim it must be the god of the gaps, and (b) merely note that whatever remains in the ever-shrinking gaps does so because non-gap science keeps expanding in explanatory power.
No, I’d read that: he says we currently assume photons are massless, but notes that photons may have a tiny mass, in which case light would travel at different speeds according to its frequency; he mentions as well that we could, in principle, get a very different answer using measurements based on laboratory experiments rather than astronomical observations; he adds that “there is good observational evidence to indicate that those parameters have not changed over most of the lifetime of the universe” and caps it with the following: “At the moment you can measure macroscopic distances most accurately by sending out laser light pulses and timing how long they take to travel using a very accurate atomic clock.”
He points to experiments that have played out to explain the falsifiable conclusion, and emphasizes that further experimentation could disprove it by producing different testable conclusions; that’s science. Is your postulated god likewise a falsifiable conclusion which currently rests on the evidence of experiments but could be disproven next week?