Trilobite eyes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, March 27, 2013, 16:36 (4260 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Wednesday, March 27, 2013, 16:54

David: Life is extremely inventive in solving problems. It was always meant to be that way.[/i]
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> I don't understand how a controlled event leads to open-ended experimentation. The huge forest-like bush suggests the exact opposite of a controlled event.-The controls are the built-in epigenetic mechanisms which allow life to be adaptive and inventive. Challenges appear and life responds with new inventions.
Of course it will end up bush-like.-
> dhw:The second is how the intelligence got into the genome. Your hypothesis is that an intelligent mind (God) put it there, and I am suggesting the intelligence evolved from within (see Talbott). The third issue is: if there is a God, what is the source of HIS intelligence?-I don't see how underlying intelligence 'evolves'. My intelligence evolved as I grew up, but my plastic brain was expanding to encompass it. Intelligence must have self-awareness and retrospection to do the underlying planning we see in the universe and in life. You are still insisting on something that appears amorphous to me. And finally, First Cause (God) is a retrospective end point. His intelligence is a necessary part of the concept.-> We shall probably never get to the bottom of how matter acquired intelligence, but if we accept the theory that this universe began 13.8 billion years ago (though I don't trust such figures), and life goes back say 3.8 billion years (ditto my mistrust), who can say that doesn't give time for a rudimentary intelligence to awaken, experiment and evolve in the manner I have described? -I can't accept that concept at all. Matter is not intelligent. Life, as a form of matter, is controlled by enormous volumes of information, imprinted in a coded system. Only a complex intelligence could have created that. You are really proposing bits of intelligence gradually associating by chance contrivance, however those bits arose. Where is the organized thinking and planning in your concept? 
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> DAVID: March 21 @ 14.56 (under "flytraps"): God's purpose was to produce inventive life. Flycatching was a by-product.
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> dhw: (dialogue continued): [...] he left the course of evolution in the "hands" of his intelligent invention ... apparently preprogrammed to experiment and take its own decisions [..]. In other words, he did not pre-programme "by-products" like flycatchers, trilobites, dinosaurs, dodos or duck-billed platypuses, but sat back watching while the intelligent genome produced its own inventions...
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> DAVID: A good synopsis of my view of evolution.
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> dhw What is clear from the above is that humans were not planned either.
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> DAVID: The material I have read about human development makes it look 'favored'. [...] Here my scenario implies a desired result.-> dhw: If it doesn't make sense, why not consider an alternative that does?-Let me try again. There is strong evidence That there was a special push toward humans. The early vertebral changes toward truly upright posture, the striking skeletal changes, the birth of the big brain problem, and the giant brain itself. None of it from necessity when we compare the existing primates, in stasis to us, not in stasis, until perhaps now.-From yesterday: DNA is a common denominator, but I theorize that it contains pre-planned codes we haven't found yet. Example: humans break out from primate forms. It started 22 million years ago with slight vertebral changes to prepare for upright posture. The upright skeletal changes alone are enormous and create a complex problem in human birth. The female pelvis is not birth friendly and requires a tortuous route to expell the kid. And how did the female pelvis adapt to the enlarging hominin heads; not by hunt and peck. And finally that enlarging head had no driving environmental requirement. Primates are still primates just like they have always been, and we are different in kind, not degree with our braininess. BUT, we evolved just like the rest of evolution, in a helter-skelter set of directions. The bush of life also shows a bush of hominins, to finally one species form, H. sapiens.
 
No question God planned US, but only He knows why he used the method He did.