Genome complexity: most important article ever! (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, May 11, 2015, 17:06 (3266 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If we reject random mutations, innovation implies a mind, but life, Nature and evolution are not terms we normally associate with a mind. Your answer is God, but many experts say that organisms also have some sort of mind. The question then is whether the ability to respond inventively to environmental change comes from outside the organism (God) or inside.
DAVID: How did it develop inside without planning?-I have conceded over and over again that the inventive mechanism may have been designed by your God. The theistic evolutionary issue between us in all these discussions is whether your God preplanned or dabbled every innovation, or whether the mechanism is autonomous. In discussing this, we need always to bear in mind that innovations take place within individual organisms, and it is misleading - as the article does and you sometimes do - to talk of life/Nature/evolution being inventive.-dhw: It's not unimaginable that all innovations are brought about by certain individual organisms having a greater degree of awareness than others - just as individual humans vary enormously in their degree of intelligence, inventiveness etc.

DAVID: I wouldn't ever compare bacteria to human variation in mental ability.-The usual objection, to which I must give the usual reply: nobody is saying that bacterial intelligence is the same as human intelligence. The point here is that since innovations take place within individual organisms, and even the smallest individual organisms are said to differ from one another (just as we do), it is possible that some are cleverer than others. That may explain why, when conditions change, some die, some adapt, and a few innovate.
 
dhw: By coincidence, today's Sunday Times reviews a new book by a biochemist named Nick Lane: THE VITAL QUESTION: 
“For two billion years, earth was populated by busy but boring bacteria and archaea, single-cell life forms known as prokaryotes [...] An archaea and a bacteria, against all the odds, mingled in a process known as endosymbiosis, and started a whole new process from which eukaryotes - cells with nuclei - emerged.”-DAVID: And this week an article on just that subject, finding eukaryote genes in Archaea:-Thank you. Perhaps the jigsaw is gradually coming together.-dhw: My post is not a complaint. I am merely pointing out that your insistence on pre-planning runs into difficulty when you are confronted with the 99% of apparent failures.
DAVID: How do you know the 99% failure rate was not planned? That is your human view of poor planning, just like the funny-looking retina objections.-I'm not talking about poor planning. I'm pointing out that you yourself have great difficulty reconciling a 99% extinction rate, plus countless weird and wonderful creatures and lifestyles (which according to you are too complex to have resulted from anything other than divine preprogramming or dabbling) with your insistence that all of them serve or served the purpose of producing humans. But I quite understand how necessary it is for you to launch diversionary attacks.