Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 12:29 (4272 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: So do you believe that God pre-programmed the very first cells to pass the blueprint for the liver down through countless generations of individual organisms and different species, or do you believe that one day he popped a few readymade livers into a few existing organisms?-DAVID: As I stated, I think the genome contained, from the beginning, the investigative potential to develop whatever was/is needed to be developed to advance from bacteria to us. God did not plop in livers, but the digestive need of the Cambrian organisms required their immediate development, and the genome found a way to do it through the pre-planned mechanisms, which we will find in the next 10-20 years. At that point agnosticism will disappear.-Let's settle for the "intelligent genome", then, as advertised in these columns. Bacteria have remained bacteria since the year dot. But other bacteria advanced, and every single advance entailed an innovation. No innovation would have survived if it had not been suited to the environment, which suggests that changes in the environment may actually have been the trigger for each innovation ... whether through necessity or through the opportunity to try out new things. And so here's one problem for your anthropocentric view of evolution: if you agree that environmental changes were the likely trigger for innovation, your God would have had to pre-plan all of them to get the desired human effect. (Or do you think he would have left the necessary environmental changes to chance?) A second problem is the term "pre-planned mechanisms". If the mechanisms for adaptation and innovation were present in the genome from the beginning, what exactly was pre-planned? You say the "intelligent genome" then "found a way" to meet the organism's digestive needs, in which case the liver wasn't pre-planned either. The organism invented it, using the "investigative potential" (innovative mechanisms) which it had inherited from the first organisms. Multiply that by the few million innovations necessary for evolution from bacteria to humans, and out goes anthropocentrism, UNLESS you go back to the (to me) highly improbable suggestion that livers, hearts, lungs, kidneys, penises, vaginas, legs, arms, eyes, brains etc. were ALL pre-programmed in the very first living cells and passed down through zillions of generations.
 
I would not be surprised either if the mechanisms for adaptation and innovation were discovered in the next 10-20 years, but the discovery won't make the slightest difference to people's beliefs. Why? Because the mechanisms have to be there anyway, and we still won't be able to say whether they were produced by a self-aware designer, chance, or an unselfconscious "intelligent energy". And so never fear, agnosticism will still be alive and kicking.