An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 02, 2014, 18:23 (3487 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: "The “intelligent information” your God may have provided in the first place is everything that goes to make up the cell, including its ‘inventive mechanism' or ‘brain'". What other “pre-existing information” are you thinking of? -DAVID: Going to the heart of the information issue: DNA is a complex code, according to Gates (Windows), himself, much more complex than anything invented by humans.[...]. DNA was present in early life, if not at the very beginning. [...] Where did the information come from? You have never given me an answer. [...] Is speciation done by absorbing new information from the environment and collating it with existing information, and guided somehow into new species. I'm stuck with no answer. We have no evidence as to how this all works. [...] I want you to tell me how you think it all happened to start life with DNA functioning. And then go on to arrange for new species to develop, and leave out chance. [My bold]-Once again you are shifting the focus of this discussion from how evolution might work to the origin of life and of whatever mechanisms have led to evolution. Your answer is that God did it, but you don't know how, and then you expect me to tell you how it was done! I don't know. I can only consider different possibilities: some sort of god; some sort of panpsychist process (see the thread on that subject, which we have discussed at length); chance, which I cannot leave out. For various reasons, I find NONE of these convincing, and so just like you, “I am stuck with no answer”. I do, however, believe that “speciation is done by absorbing new information from the environment and collating it with existing information...” A good summing up of the evolutionary process that followed on after life had started. And that is the point at which this discussion begins.
 
You have suggested that God preprogrammed the first living cells with all the innovations over the following 3.7 billion years. You take this seriously, though research has provided no evidence for it and you don't know how it works, but you dismiss out of hand my own hypothesis because there is no evidence for it and I don't know how it works. Ah, there's no justice in Texan philosophy! Do you think your God is incapable of designing an autonomously inventive mechanism (even though you believe he has done so with the human brain)? Please answer.-dhw: My hypothesis does not avoid design. It proposes that evolutionary innovation is designed by an inventive mechanism in the genome, and it allows for that mechanism to have been designed by your God.......
DAVID: You have't explained what you mean by 'design'. -By design, I mean the deliberate creation of an object as opposed to its having come about by chance. In this case, God may have created the mechanism, and the mechanism may have created the innovations that led to speciation.-DAVID: Dawkins says life appears designed, but is not. I say it is designed. Your position, please!-Once again the subject of this thread is how evolution proceeds and not how life began. However, after nearly seven years of discussion, I'd have thought you would have known by now that my position is on the picket fence. I agree that life appears designed, and so I refuse to say it is not. But just as I have problems believing in chance, I have problems believing in any kind of designer, whether it's a single mind, plural minds, or a vast collection of minds that have evolved through experience of changing matter...and so I cannot go beyond the statement that life appears designed. That is why I am an agnostic. Now please tell me why your comprehensive 3.7-billion-year computer programme bothers you, and what evolutionary alternative you can think of.