Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 03, 2013, 19:10 (3826 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw; The diversification of life through innovation can ONLY take place through cell communities undergoing changes and cooperating with one another, whether preprogrammed or not. But for all we know, each successful "committee" is counterbalanced by ten thousand unsuccessful committees. We know of the innovative successes, but not the failures.-If you follow David Raup, bad luck not failure.-> dhw: With regard to adaptation, however, we do know there have been successes and failures: dinosaurs failed to adapt and died out; bacteria adapted and lived on. Perfectly understandable in the case of ungodlike cell communities pursuing their own "agenda": you win some, you lose some. But if your almighty planner was behind it all, how come he had so many failures?-That is why I have automatic a,b, and c choices. Creates variation and adaptation. And then the bad luck failures.
> 
> dhw; The problem is innovation, not some degree of variation. All the new organs and all the new ways of life: preprogrammed from the beginning, or specially created. Or, strangely, some biochemists have actually observed how cells and cell communities communicate and cooperate...but no, perish the thought that they could be anything more than automatons...-Find a biochemist who doesn't describe an automatic chemical series of answers to stimuli-> 
> dhw: They are observed to cooperate, but no-one has observed the original invention of the organs that led from eukaryotes to humans, and so no-one can say what enabled the cells to produce the innovations. That gives us both room to speculate.-But your speculation takes the ability of cells to an area of action they cannot perform.-> 
> dhw: The only reality we know is that organs are composed of cooperating cells. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that cells/cell communities cooperated (whether programmed or not) to produce new organs. We are only just beginning to understand the mechanisms that enable cells to function, but I seem to remember one scientist saying that the cell is still, like the universe, 95% dark matter. That cells seem to work automatically in existing organs is true, because when they cease to do so, those organs tend to break down. But that tells us nothing about how they combined and cooperated in the first place to produce innovations. Please tell me which biology reference book provides scientific evidence that an unknown and unknowable power preprogrammed the first cells to pass on to their descendants all the programmes needed to produce countless innovations, that this same power also preprogrammed choices to create minor variations, and that this same power directed evolution so that it would end up with humans. Your speculations have no more basis in reality than mine. Still level pegging!-Your speculation is based on cells doing more than just cooperating. They are realy programmed to do just that and no more. Where we are not level is that cells cannot plan for complex organ operations and functions. They just do what they are instructed to do.