DILEMMAS (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, October 27, 2014, 23:55 (3467 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw:We are not at an impasse at all. “The information to design systems” is a million miles away from preprogramming the first cells with every innovation there ever was. If you expand the expression slightly and call it “the information that gives an organism the ability to design systems”, you have another expression for an inventive mechanism. This will use its in-built (or if you like, God-given) information to process the information that comes from outside and produce its inventions accordingly. -This is where we part ways in the understanding of 'information'. The information that produces major advances is either pre-programmed from the beginning, to which I think you agree, but the 'information' used by an IM is only somewhat 'from outside' as a definition of the challenges to be met, but is also instructional information or guidelines within the IM, that have had to be implanted in the IM from the very beginning of life. You keep suggesting that IM information is all new and up to date at the time for the necessary changes in organisms, and I view this as nothing further from the truth of the issue. The instructional information in the IM comes from the very beginning of life. -
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> dhw: If you accept common descent, you are accepting the basis of his theory. The question of how life evolved from OOL to now is what we are investigating, and we both reject random mutations and gradualism. -We agree. We think there was common descent. I totally reject chance.-> dhw:What else do you reject? Natural selection creates nothing but explains why certain organisms survive and others don't. It is self-evident, but in Darwin's day it wasn't, so do you reject that?-No. There is competition.-> dhw: Theistic evolution is not a refutation of Darwin. -Yes it is. For Darwin evolution was a chance naturalistic mechanism. Theistic means God-guided evolution, under His total control.
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> dhw: And you know you can't explain why trilobites, triceratops, silk-spinning spiders and myrmecophilous beetles were/are essential for the production of humans.-Except to create a balance in nature, which as I've noted, can be upset.
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> dhw: God created a mechanism within the cell..... creating most of the variations we see in the evolutionary bush...[/i]
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> DAVID: Certainly possible. Not found yet and what we adaptive ability we have found so far looks too weak to do that.
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> Phew! So after all that vehement opposition, you agree that it's certainly possible. That is all I keep asking you to accept.-But as I have described, if present, most of it probably pre-programmed with guidelines and instructions, from the beginning.
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> dhw: Evolution is going through a period of stasis, and so currently we see only adaptation.-> DAVID: We may be at the end of evolution with humans fully arrived.
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> dhw: You and I will never know. But adaptation in itself is hugely complex, and denotes awareness and great technical skill to be employed by the “brain” in the genome. So maybe that brain is capable of more than adaptation.-I won't accept that, as noted above.
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> dhw: Another yes - so you are agreeing that instead of preprogramming, God may have dabbled. If so, we can dispense with his preprogramming the first cells with every single innovation: major structures may have been inserted as evolution proceeded, but other innovations were created by 
the IM. Hence the bush.-Again, no. IM innovations I still view as minor.-> 
> dhw: Thank you. Personally, I'd say a missing layer capable of innovation as well as adaptation (for which a mechanism must exist) is more likely than a missing 3.7-billion-year-old programme for all life's innovations. Anyway, this is a big advance on yesterday's post, in which you wrote: “You certainly don't think as I do. The IM is adaptation and nothing more. The Basic Patterns are all in the pre-programming.” -You have totally missed the point about information in an IM, as I view it and stated above. I have repeated the term guidelines over and over. They come from 3.7 billion years ago, and the IM has some minor autonomy.