How epigenetics works (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 11, 2013, 19:07 (4124 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw; [...] the so-called "simple" forms of life must have incorporated this inventive intelligence from the beginning in a mechanism so complex that the odds against its chance assembly become incalculable.
 
DAVID: Bravo. Finally seeing my point. of course, the complexity has to be at the very beginning or you can't get here from there.-Not "finally", David. This has always been one of the prime reasons why I am an agnostic and not an atheist.-dhw; [...] the above scenario runs counter to the anthropocentric interpretation of evolution, because of its higgledy-piggledy progress, unless God found his plans going awry and needed to intervene "at appropriate moments" (goodbye to omniscience and omnipotence). -DAVID: No. It is anthropocentric. We are here. What caused our big brain? it wasn't needed by the circumstances what it appeared. It was caused! We started very close to apes. They are still doing their thing, thank you, living just fine as long as we don't interfere, which unfortunately we tend to do. They didn't grow any more neurons because they were not required Neither were ours but we've got them. For no good reason except under pre-planning they were required.-You are repeating part of my post of 09 January at 19.21: "you yourself have made the point ... from the survival of bacteria to the non-necessity of the human brain ... that evolution did not REQUIRE innovation". Your questions concerning the human brain can be applied to EVERY innovation, since earlier forms of life have survived without legs, wings, eyes etc. Should we say that evolution is spidercentric, because spiders' webs were not required, birdcentric because wings were not required, antcentric because ant colonies were not required? They are also "here"! Every innovation dating back to the earliest forms of life is a "bonus", and we have agreed that this can only be traced to a mechanism that must have been there at the beginning, unless one believes in Creationism. If those earliest forms of life were preprogrammed eventually to produce the human brain, they must have been preprogrammed eventually to produce webs, wings, and colonies (not to mention preprogramming the environmental changes without which these innovations would not have happened). And presumably they were also preprogrammed eventually to produce dinosaurs and dodos. Was their extinction also preprogrammed within those earliest forms of life? The suggestion that these contained a mechanism that could invent new things in accordance with a changing environment explains all the comings and goings that have led to the higgledy-piggledy bush, which you yourself have admitted is not a logical structure if from the very beginning the aim was to produce humans.