Evolution v Creationism: guided evolution? dhw? (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:38 (3299 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: ....how did first life develop and include the ability to know its surroundings and respond properly, which it must do to survive. Stated another way develop a working living metabolism and a protective response mechanism all at the same time. Can't have one without the other. Still magic to me.-Agreed. We also have to account for reproduction and innovation. It's as “magical” as a mind from nowhere that can create universes and bacteria.
 
dhw: My “favourite” scientists talk of the sentient, cognitive, communicative, decision-making cell. Clear distinctions, but you lump them all together, which I suppose makes it easier for you to assume automatism. 
DAVID: ...my thoughts about automatism are not based on lumping, but on how responses to information are answered molecularly. -For you, the apparent sentience, cognition, communications and decision-making are all automatically governed by “information” your God has planted. You do not seem to distinguish between what is clearly automatic (perception of information through the equivalent of the senses) and individual cognition (the processing and use of such information) which is NOT clearly automatic.-dhw: If I could describe the cell equivalent of the brain, i.e. the intelligent, inventive mechanism that does the processing and coordinates the communication, enabling adaptation and quite possibly also innovation, I would stand alongside Crick and Watson in the Nobel pantheon.
DAVID: But the job is mostly done. The molecular reactions are mostly described, and the machinery in action is visualized. The issue is: was information used to create the automatic molecular reactions and now is not present as everything is functional, or is the genome reacting with information to be responsive in an ongoing way, as if it has a mind. -More obfuscation with “information”! The “machinery in action” has indeed been described on all levels, from perception through to cognition, in bacteria as in humans. But we do not know the extent to which that “machinery” is automatic or autonomous, or how autonomy actually works. Hence the never-ending debate on human free will. The job is nowhere near done - for cells/cell communities or for humans.-DAVID: I prefer the former interpretation, which implies design and God did it. the latter approach seems to avoid God and tries to expect that chance created the responsive abilities.-Like evolution itself, the IM hypothesis neither rejects nor favours God, but the mechanism would have to be of astonishing complexity, and so your design argument would still apply. However, your anthropocentric view of God demands his complete control of evolution, and so you can't bear the thought that he might have given his invention a free hand!
 
DAVID: Cells have a list of responses to choose from depending on the type and strength of stimuli. All automatic.-So 3.7 billion years ago, your God gave the first cells a list of possible responses to every future change in the environment, to be passed on through zillions of organisms so that 1% could automatically adapt and innovate, while 99% were preprogrammed to make the wrong choice (automatically) when certain changes took place. This particular human mind boggles.