Genome complexity: most important article ever! (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 22:38 (3272 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.
DAVID: The increasing complexity from early to recent evolution is inventiveness conducted by living organisms. You are quibbling. The recent review article I presented showed that we have no idea how innovation occurs.-Of course we have no idea. That's why we come up with hypotheses. My IM hypothesis depends on the inventive mechanism within individual organisms, as you have agreed, and not on the inventiveness of “Nature”, which is a blanket concept that ignores individuality.-dhw: 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.-DAVID: Agreed but we don't know how.-Your agreement is music to my ears.-dhw: 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... 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.
DAVID: Not diversionary. Once again, if God did it and I don't understand why or how, that does not mean one should not be able to accept that God worked through an evolutionary process. My problem is I cannot read His mind as He plans His goals, nor can anyone else.-We both accept the evolutionary process, and I accept the possibility that your God may have started it all, but you DO try to read his mind.His goal, you say, was to produce humans; he did it by preprogramming or by dabbling, to which you have added an inventive mechanism that must also be preprogrammed or dabbled with, because it is not autonomous. So long as you put forward such hypotheses, it seems to me fair enough to examine their reasonableness in the light of what we can observe. You are more than happy to do so when confronted with the hypothesis of the autonomous inventive mechanism!