Innovation and Speciation (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, May 05, 2011, 12:27 (4740 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I had suggested an analogy between bees' intelligent invention of new architecture, plus a new social structure, and the possible intelligent combining of cells to create new organs and species.-TONY: It is the use of invented here that I have a problem with. As I stated previously there is a difference between adaptation, innovation and invention, it is small, but critical. I see the hive structure of bees as more likely an adaptation to a very simple problem.-You go on to explain why. I'm quite happy to withdraw the whole analogy if it clouds the issue, since the inventiveness or adaptability of bees is not my focus. The problem I'm trying to solve is that of innovation and speciation ... which I see as inseparable. I think there's a major difference in the evolutionary context between innovation/invention and adaptation (which preserves existing species), but even if the advance of epigenetics proved that adaptation could produce innovation, it would still make no difference to the argument. Adaptation itself could be the product of intelligent communication between cells, and I'm merely taking this one step further.
 
I'm also happy to accept your distinction between innovation and invention, if you feel that invention entails abstract creativity (perhaps implying a human-type consciousness, which I'm anxious to avoid in this context). Again it doesn't affect the argument. For some unknown reason, new organs and species have come into existence, and no current theory has been borne out by evidence. My scenario, let me repeat, is that cells themselves have a form of communicative intelligence which every so often comes up with new combinations. If successful, these survive, and in due course up comes another new combination, and so the bush gradually grows, eventually flowering into little ole you and me...I find this more convincing than the Darwinian theory of chance mutations, and for an atheist it would reduce dependence on chance (only the origin of the intelligent mechanism would be a problem, but not the origin of organs and species). For a theist it would provide an alternative to the pre-programming theory, more in line with the let's-see-what-happens image of an experimental God (he leaves the cells to work things out, instead of directing them). It fits in well with the bush ... which in my opinion conforms less well to pre-planning ... it fits in whether the mechanism itself arose by chance or by design, and it fits in with discoveries relating to communications. So what does it NOT fit in with?