Trilobite eyes (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 30, 2013, 19:37 (4047 days ago) @ David Turell

David, the article you referred us to just a few days ago, and to which I responded on 26 March, is:-http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/evolution-and-the-illusion-of-randomness-I can't find your original entry either, but you recommended that we read the appendix (Barbara McClintock) and referred to it again on 24 March at 20.23 as your entry "just preceding this". The whole essay brilliantly elucidates why randomness in evolution is an illusion.-DAVID: Talbott did not write this essay to drive folks to God, but to demand that we shift our attention to the developing overall picture. As for his theology, I have no clue, but his essay strongly supports a belief in God.-Your first sentence is spot on. Your second sentence completely ignores the fact (not even a "clue") that he explicitly rejects the notion of ID. Tony has used the expression "willful disbelief", and your statement is the clearest possible example. Please read Talbott's rejection once more:
 
"Although the word has its legitimate uses, you will not find me speaking of design, simply because — as I've made abundantly clear in previous articles — organisms cannot be understood as having been designed, machine-like, whether by an engineer-God or a Blind Watchmaker elevated to god-like status. If organisms participate in a higher life, it is a participation that works from within — at a deep level the ancients recognized as that of the logos informing all things. It is a sharing of the springs of life and being, not a mere receptivity to some sort of external mechanical tinkering modeled anthropocentrically on human engineering."-You can of course use his essays as evidence for your own hypothesis, and as an agnostic I accept the possibility that your interpretation may be correct. But if you quote people like Hoyle and Talbott and Nagel and Shapiro to bolster your case, you should at least have some respect for their own views. These men are not idiots. They observe what you observe, but they do not draw the same conclusions. This in itself is a perfect illustration that your faith is "speculation based on observations that could mean something else entirely", as Tony says of evolution.-DAVID: In her 1983 Nobel address, geneticist Barbara McClintock cited various ways an organism responds to stress by, among other things, altering its own genome. "Some sensing mechanism must be present in these instances to alert the cell to imminent danger," she said, adding that "a goal for the future would be to determine the extent of knowledge the cell has of itself, and how it utilizes this knowledge in a 'thoughtful' manner when challenged."-Could you possibly find a clearer description of "the intelligent genome" ... or in this case, my original term "the intelligent cell" ... even going so far as to talk about the cell's possible knowledge of itself? -DAVID: Subsequent research has shown how far-seeing she was.-It would appear that the "panpsychist" hypothesis is not so way out after all.
 
DAVID: Random chance? Horse manure!-Agreed. Proof of a divine designer? Horse manure! Ask Hoyle, Talbott, Nagel, Shapiro.