A new synthesis: Four dimensions of Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 09, 2015, 14:01 (3054 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: In the simplest of terms: did life/intelligence originate by chance or by design? This question, however, is irrelevant to the actual process of evolution.-DAVID: No, no, no! If life was designed then per force, design rules evolution. You want design to start the process and then stop?-As always, you assume that your reading of God's mind is correct, and that he designed the evolutionary mechanisms for the purpose of creating or providing for humans, and so he preprogrammed every stage (or intervened). With my theist hat on, I have suggested that he designed the mechanisms in such a way that organisms themselves rule evolution, and that would explain the higgledy-piggledy bush. In your hypothesis the mechanisms are automatic or “guided”, and in mine they are autonomous, but they are the same mechanisms and led to the same result. (If life was not designed, organisms have created their own history anyway.) An alternative to your God's preprogramming/dabbling and my autonomous inventive intelligence is Darwin's random mutations, but he also stated explicitly that the origin of life was not relevant to his theory. Another alternative of course is Creationism, but our subject here is evolution. -dhw: It's not clear to me how symbolic fits in with evolution, but the passing on of information is clearly essential to all forms of life. We have had long discussions on the subject of information, and again to update you, we have concluded that it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between information itself and the intelligence that uses it. -DAVID: Remember DNA is a symbolic code. From an ID review of Jablonka's book:
"Jablonka also argues that semantic information can only exist with living or designed systems. “Only a living system can make a source into an informational input.” On page 588 Jablonka emphasizes the function of bioinformation. Thus the joint authors of this paper are not alone in our emphasis on the formal nature of life's many control mechanisms."-In other words, as we agreed, it requires intelligence to make information meaningful.