I am campaigning again for the idea that the intelligent cell is the mechanism that drives evolution, through adaptation and innovation in response to changes in the environment.-I agree, except I maintain that intelligence cells come from an initial intelligence.
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> DAVID: How did the intelligent mechanism arise? Doesn't intelligence mean a mind was at work?
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> This is the great theistic cop-out. The answer to your question may well be yes, but you refuse to ask the same question when it comes to the intelligence which you believe created earthly intelligence. Here your answer is always "First Cause", which explains absolutely nothing. If an eternal, universal intelligence can simply be there (first cause), and all things follow on from it, then an eternal, ever-changing, unconscious universe can simply be there (first cause), and all things follow on from that, including the chance combination ... out of an infinity of chance combinations ... that gave rise to intelligent life.-You must assume that Big Bang did not occur to have an eternal universe. Recent math papers I have quoted here indicate that there is no 'before' before the Big Bang and this applies to multiverses also. (Alexander Vilenkin):-http://www.newgeology.us/Alexander%20Vilenkin.pdf - We must admit that nothing can come from nothing, in a strict philosophic sense. Therefore, something is eternal, and that must be energy, because the universe is entirely composed of energy. What your proposal is left with is two-fold: unorganized energy by chance created what we see today or the energy had organization from the beginning and that energy had a direction toward complexity and created what we see today. The odds favor the latter.- 
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> Dhw: ...in the light of modern science 150 years later, his basic insight still stands up to scientific scrutiny: namely, that all forms of life evolved from earlier forms through diversification and suitability to existing environments. These new discoveries are on the way to explaining how.
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> DAVID: It is very difficult to deny evolution occurred.
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> In that case, one should beware of sensational headings like "NEO-DARWINISM JUST DIED"!-I was describing the death of a bastard theory, not evolution itself. And Alfred Rusel Wallace did much more of the observing and reached the more logical conclusion.
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> Dhw: The belief that these could somehow be attributed to chance clearly has no more basis in science than the belief that it was all designed by an eternal, universal, unobservable and inexplicable intelligence. -See above. It all still is involved in faith in either of the two proposals I gave above.

David and I have been discussing the hypothesis that the intelligent cell is the mechanism that drives evolution. I'd now like to apply this hypothesis to the gaps in Darwin's theory. (All Darwin quotations and references from Chapter VI of Origin ... "Difficulties on Theory".)-If we accept that evolution happened, i.e. that all current forms of life are descended from earlier forms ... as opposed to a god creating all the different species separately in the last 6000 or so years ... we need to explain how the simple was able to develop into the complex (regardless of whether a god created the initial mechanism). Darwin surmised that random mutations ... but not natural selection ... were responsible for innovations: "natural selection can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur". Whatever organs resulted from these were able to improve themselves over long periods of time by adaptation to different environments, by modifications, or even by changes of function (for instance, the swim bladder in fish may have become the lung in land animals). He regarded the long periods and the smallness of changes as essential to his theory: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Of course it can't be "demonstrated", but time and again he was confronted by the fact that "by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed". His explanation for their not being found was mainly the "imperfection of the geological record". It should be noted that all of this remains gospel to many scientists even today.-A mutation, whether random or not, needs to function if it is to survive. And so already we are confronted with something sudden, not gradual. In the context of the eye, Darwin argues that over a long period, numerous gradations could lead from "one very imperfect and simple eye" to "a perfect and complex eye", "but how a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us..." It should! A nerve sensitive to anything is of astonishing complexity, as is the simplest of simple eyes, and it needs to be incorporated into the theory. In any case, what is "perfection"? Darwin cites the eagle as his "perfect" example, and sees no difficulty in believing that this has come about because natural selection has "converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve coated with pigment and invested by transparent membrane" into this perfection. How does the simple eye of one species end up as the perfect eye of another species? (I'm not saying it doesn't ... I'm asking how.) Natural selection does not convert anything. It merely selects from what exists. Why should a functioning organ like a simple eye, having survived because it is advantageous, bother to make itself more complex, let alone transfer itself from one species to another? If it comes to that, why should simple organisms that have survived to this day have also branched out to create more complex organisms? Clearly they didn't have to. And yet they did.-All of these gaps in the theory can be filled (and in my view the theory does not break down at all) if we accept the hypothesis of the intelligent cell. We know for a fact that cells combine, that they allocate themselves different functions, that even within our intelligent selves they act independently of our will and consciousness. We have been told that they have their own means of communication. Why, then, should we not suppose that in accordance with the conditions imposed by any particular environment, cells at various given moments have joined together on their own initiative to create the organs and organisms we are familiar with today? Each new combination would have been instant, but each new combination could engender the idea for a different combination, or an improvement in existing combinations (= different types of eye), or variations within a species (different hominids), in the process that Simon Conway Morris describes as "convergence". The fossil record shows no transitional forms because there were none. Favourable mutations are not due to chance but to deliberate adaptation or experimentation by the cell communities. The Cambrian Explosion ... an insoluble problem for Darwin ... can be explained by a major change in the environment (perhaps connected with an increase in oxygen) engendering a vast range of adaptations and innovations by these intelligent cells. Bacteria are still going strong, but a new combination does not necessitate the extinction of old combinations. Whatever works, survives. Theists can detect a divine plan if they wish, atheists can reduce their reliance on chance, and both sides can embrace the same hypothesis as to how the process works. Their beliefs will simply revolve around the one area of evolution that Darwin did not tackle in Origin which, ironically, is the origin of the intelligent cell that enabled evolution to take place.-What are the gaps and/or flaws in this hypothesis?