An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, September 11, 2014, 20:27 (3509 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your cell planning is simply wild speculation, because you continue to ignore the complex specificity of life, as Tony and I point out. Cells cannot plan for major change. Look at the whale series, giant changes requiring major engineering. Only advanced intelligence can. This is one of the major reasons I became a theist.-Then as an evolutionist, you seem to have no choice: 3.7 billion years ago, your God implanted the very first living cells with programmes for every single innovation leading from single cells to whales and humans, and all the different species in between. I suspect some people would call that “wild speculation”. Your alternative is to reject evolution and opt for separate creation. But you are against that.
 
Dhw (to Tony:) Concept 3***, of course, excludes evolution. I do hope David will explain to you why he is so against it. [***Evolution didn't happen: but God made every species separately at different times.]
DAVID: I don't follow the Bible. God is mentally powerful enough to not need 3.
-Why does separate creation require more “mental power” than creating a computer programme to be passed down through billions of species over billions of years? Meanwhile, Tony has posted a detailed defence of his creationist theory, which I will try to answer tomorrow.-I asked you how, if cells were automatons, the brain cells of one person could work their way round an abnormality while someone else's couldn't. You said it was easy: brain plasticity.-dhw: What does brain plasticity mean?..... and doesn't it suggest that brain cells do not respond to a given programme but somehow make their own decisions?
DAVID: Einstein's brain had an area in the temporal lobe almost 1/2 inch thicker than normal. It was a conceptual area. We know that we can affect and raise brain IQ by certain techniques. Brain neurons are programmed to respond to intelletual activity, and areas of the brain grow new neurons and connections. [...]-None of this explains why some brain cell communities can cope with abnormality and others can't, if all them are automatons merely obeying God's instructions. -DAVID: Some of the complexity that cellular committees cannot plan are the automatic protein folding proceses in cells. These are highly complex maneuvers that must have exact results, and to be properly understood cells are like automated auto factories. These are very exact highly controlled processes. A mistakec and the cell kills itself.:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/map-of-body-s-protein-folding-machinery-wins-...-Here are some quotes: “You now have cells that may inappropriately signal and become rogue cells that could become a danger to the organism. Rather than doing that, the cells try to establish equilibrium and then establish a balance between capacity and need. If that balance cannot be achieved, the cell submits to apoptosis - cell death.”-“We wanted to find the molecular machinery that allows one component of the cell to talk to another. [...] We [...] asked the question how does one part of the cell know what is going on in another part.”-“We are trying to figure out the molecular pathways by which the cells make the decisions and decide if they need to kill themselves.”-I am puzzled by the fact that your God (so mentally powerful that he doesn't need to create species separately) has invented a programme which makes some automated cells become “rogue”, other automated cells and parts of cells talk to one another, and automated cells take decisions as to whether or not they should kill themselves, though you say none of them can do anything except obey God's instructions. Do you not also find it confusing?-DAVID: How a small number of genes can make a complex human:
“There are a finite number of genes in the genome, and changing which of those gets turned on or off gives you a certain level of complexity,” Calarco said. “What alternative splicing does is add another layer of complexity, allowing an organism to diversify a cell type even more — we think this contributes a great deal to an organism's ability to diversify its cellular function and cellular architecture.”-http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/08/neurons-at-work/-This may explain some of the innovations-Strange that Calarco talks of an organism's ability to diversify its cellular function etc. It's almost as if he's saying that there is some mechanism within the organism that takes such decisions. -In your post earlier today, there were two very striking sentences: “...I feel God could create an evolutionary system that could do a great deal of its own advancement planning.” And “Certainly, evolution looks like there was a process in place that God could have started.” An evolutionary system can't plan. Living organisms can plan, thereby creating a system. And so you are actually saying that living organisms could do a great deal of their own advancement planning. And if evolution is a process that God started, but he did NOT do all the “advancement planning”, he would have had to implant some kind of planning mechanism within the organisms he created. Organisms are made of cells. Where would he have put the mechanism for advancement planning?