Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 05, 2014, 18:25 (3542 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your very strained alternative, by severely extrapolating the theories of Shapiro and others, is that the cells did it by themselves. I'll ask you, did the cell mechanisms, Shapiro calls genetic engineering, appear by chance or did the cells invent those mechanisms themselves? It all still comes down to chance or design. Sorry no third way.-The alternative I have offered quite explicitly allows for the cell mechanisms to have been designed:-4) Cell communities combined their intelligence (which may have been invented by your God) to design the liver and the billions of other innovations, as and when environmental change demanded or allowed them.-In this discussion I am interested only in finding a possible explanation for the innovations which have driven evolution from bacteria to humans. You quite rightly say you don't know. Nobody knows. We can only advance theories. You keep telling me what I keep telling you: that innovations demand perfect cooperation between the different cell communities, but you categorically reject divine preprogramming, divine fiddling and random mutations as the force behind this cooperation. So what else could bring it about if not the intelligence of the cells themselves? The theist can then argue that only God could have designed such an inventively, cooperatively intelligent mechanism, and the atheist can argue that it came about by chance.