Innovation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 28, 2013, 19:01 (4228 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: What I know quite clearly is that there is intelligence in the cells in the form of an amazing code, its many layers, and the complex instructions within those layers to create automatic absolute control of the production processes of life and the responses to adversity when it appears.
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> dhw:In that case, I assume you are now prepared to accept the concept of the "intelligent cell"! It's the implications that are the issue between us.-Not at all. You are avoiding the implications of my last post. I have stated that no one has any idea of how evolution really works. The evidence appears to demonstrate that once life appeared, and we certainly have no idea how that happened, there was a process of evolution. We have no idea how species appear, but they seem to erupt de novo, not in little bitty advances. -Our difference is in each of us having a different concept of how a cell works at a molecular level. In my view automatically operating molecules under the control of the genome manufacture or perform whatever they are assigned to do. Different parts of DNA are operative in different ways in various cell types. Liver cells use a different expressed portion of DNA than kidney cells, and so forth. -Identifying gene function is partially by deletion in embryos. Knock out a gene and see what does not appear to form. Other methods include statistical analyses of function. I cannot find any information on the direct routes of instruction from gene to functioning cell. We know what they control, but not really how. -What I am showing is that life is some type of emergent process, and that we only have curently only a glimpse at understanding the underlying mechanisms. The complexity to be elucidated seems overwhelming.
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> DAVID: You clearly see the problem. And you don't accept chance. So you would like to invent a self-indulgent cell, to avoid design.
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> dhw: There are two levels to this discussion, and you are confusing them. The first is how evolution works, ...... Your own concept of how evolution works is hamstrung by your insistence that the human branch of the bush was planned and preprogrammed in advance, whereas all other species are byproducts that were not planned and preprogrammed. ........ You can also dispense with your atheistic type argument: it looks as if it thinks (is designed) but it doesn't (isn't)!-I must keep repeating that I am a theistic evolutionist. God created life, God does seem to dabble, but I don't know how much, so I make guesses based on the process I see in evoutionary development. I see the development of humans as a push that evolution, by itself, did not call for in the challenges presented for adaptation. Mine is not an atheistic styled argument. Design underlies all of evolution. You don't accept design, so you cannot follow the reasoning. If God dabbles, the structure of evolution is not rigid. -> 
> dhw: The second level was summed up in my post of 26 April at 14.46: "I'm arguing that there has to be an inventive intelligence at work within them. (How it got there is open to question.)" You now agree, and I have repeatedly argued that this concept does NOT exclude design.-I don't agree with your way of viewing it. The cell has intelligence in that the cell is under control of the intelligence in the genome. It is a two step arrangement. The genome tells the cell what to do. Gene expression is different in every one of the 300+ cell types. (see above)-> dhw: And it's at this point that I find myself in difficulty: how did this inventive intelligence within the cell come into being? ... However, my ignorance of the source of the intelligence makes no difference to my growing conviction that the cell is not an automaton (which would require preprogramming of every single innovation) but has ... or has been given? ... an intelligence of its own. They are two separate issues.-Not separate as I explain it. The intelligence in the genome runs the cell. I don't know how species or their separate organs formed,but the whole organism adapts. We see it but we don't know how. We don't know how organs adapt, and that is the cellular level you are struggling with. Individual cells do not create new organisms or even new organs. You are trying to put intelligence where it does not exist.