Genome complexity: new review of epigenetics studies (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 09, 2017, 11:58 (2544 days ago) @ David Turell

David: I understand that you divide the God issue into two parts. Lets simply accept that I am convinced God exists and you aren't. Fine. As to the second issue, I see humans as His purpose, nothing more. His method is evolution. He does that with the development of the universe, of Earth, and with life. That history is quite clear.

No, it is not “quite clear”. There is no clear line of development between the countless species, lifestyles and natural wonders and what you believe to be the sole purpose of evolution, which is humans. You gloss this over with the illogical argument that your God – who in your most recent version has unlimited powers – chose to preprogamme or personally design all of these organisms and wonders (epitomized by the weaverbird’s nest) in order to keep life going until he could design the one and only thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: I do not know how He manages speciation, but it is obvious to me He does handle speciation.

Once again, don’t forget the specially designed lifestyles and natural wonders (which today include the selection of queen bees). Nobody “knows”, but you have persistently proposed a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or direct divine intervention, and you reject any other suggestion.

DAVID: Thank you for mentioning the current natures wonders. They bring up the major point I make. In creating a lifestyle or a new species, the designer or planner must have a mental vision of the future before beginning to design the jump to the next step in a developing evolution.

A good diversion from the above dislocated anthropocentrism, but you are making assumptions here. Lifestyles and wonders and even species may all be the consequence not of planning but of intelligent, inventive responses to environmental conditions which represent either a threat or an opportunity. This is crystal clear when we actually observe organisms changing their structure in order to adapt. No planning – simply a direct response. The (perhaps God-given) mechanism for change is there. Extend the principle to lifestyle: the climate becomes a threat to the organism, and so the only solution is migration. Extend it to natural wonders: maybe by chance two organisms hit upon a scenario that is of mutual benefit, and this becomes the wonder of symbiosis. Extend it to speciation: an aquatic organism discovers an abundance of food on land, and its body adapts to the new opportunities, with fins in due course becoming legs etc. All of these depend on the creative response of cell communities to new conditions, and not on planning. You are sceptical that cell communities have the intelligence to go beyond the process of minor adaptation and achieve all these complexities. You may be right. But nobody knows. Just like your divine preprogramming and dabbling, it is a hypothesis.

DAVID: That vision of the future will not be possible in bacteria which lack the consciousness to see a picture of a future arrangement as multicellular organisms, as one clear example of my viewpoint. To jump the gaps in the fossil record the organisms must visualize what is wanted or needed in the future in order to set up the design. Currently the only organisms we know of that have that capacity are humans, or at a different level, God!

Bacteria clearly know the advantages of joining together to form a community, since this is how they solve many of the problems they are confronted with. And once we have multicellular communities, “currently” who knows how much their intelligence is capable of as they respond to (as opposed to planning for) the challenges and opportunities provided by changing conditions?

DAVID: We have round and round about how God runs evolution. I am convinced He guides each speciation and His goal is humans with a smidgen of His consciousness.

Your being convinced that he guides each speciation AND lifestyle AND natural wonder provides no evidence (a) that he does, or (b) that he does so with the sole purpose of producing humans, and your conviction does not make these dislocated ideas any more coherent.