Living cells communicate (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, October 06, 2012, 13:29 (4433 days ago) @ David Turell

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.-DAVID: under "Duck billed dinosaur teeth": They had the best grazing teeth ever evolved. The plants at the time must have been ultra tough to produce what I presume to be epigenetic changes for adaptation. Current grazing teeth are not as complex. Evolution going backwards? No, just built-in adaptation by the evolutionary process. It is obvious evolutionary life can do anything it has to at any stage of evolution. -http://phys.org/news/2012-10-fossilized-teethduck-bill-dinosaurs-plant-pulverizing-teet...-Either has to (adaptation) or decides to (innovation). Either way, it all comes down to responses at the cellular level.-DAVID: How did the intelligent mechanism arise? Doesn't intelligence mean a mind was at work?-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. I can only repeat that I understand the reasoning behind both scenarios, but why should I believe that a superintelligence can just be there, whereas a lesser intelligence has to be deliberately designed?
 
Dhw: I have never understood why he [Darwin] insisted that his theory depended on gradualism, or indeed why the title of his masterpiece states that species originate "by means of natural selection"-DAVID: He studied the breeders who achieved slow and gradual change and were the 'natural selectors'.-His theory is based on studies covering a vast range of plant and animal life, not just deliberate breeding by humans, but I'll come back to gradualism another time.
 
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.-DAVID: It is very difficult to deny evolution occurred.-In that case, one should beware of sensational headings like "NEO-DARWINISM JUST DIED"!
 
Dhw: In the context of design versus chance, his [Darwin's] own agnostic open-mindedness also stands up to scientific scrutiny. Even he could never have dreamt how complex the mechanisms of heredity etc. would prove to be. 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.-DAVID: Since you don't accept either choice, is there a third modality? Ah, I know, that painful picket fence! Because there is no other choice.-Precisely. But the picket fence is not painful. It's well padded and allows one a clear view of two equally spectacular but equally hedged-in fields!