Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 30, 2013, 12:19 (4226 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If I put on my theist hat, my objection is not to your idea that God dabbles, which I find perfectly reasonable, but to your proposal that God preplanned and preprogrammed the human line of the bush, whereas the other lines were byproducts that depended on unpredictable environmental changes. .....Innovation is the key, and the problem with your anthropocentric preplanning is that humans also depend on innovations resulting from random environmental change. Yes to dabbling, no to preprogramming!-DAVID: In a sense you are correct. Dabbling is poking into the system for mid-flight corrections. Pre-programming is setting a course in advance. I've said I don't know, and literally can't know, but I don't see why a combination of both cannot be present. Bacteria are the most successful organisms, both in bio-mass and longevity. Why did they bother to form multicellular organisms? Either a one-time dabble or preprogramming fits. The same for humans springing out of the primate herd.-I made the same point about bacteria, as evidence that innovation and not adaptation is the driving force behind evolution. At that early stage, it makes little difference whether it was a dabbling or a preprogramming, but you can't sneak humans in under the same umbrella unless you wish to argue that your God preprogrammed the eyes, sex, lungs, livers, brains etc. of all the species that preceded humans. "Springing out of the primate herd" could only be a divine dabble, or a stroke of genius by the intelligent cell/genome/DNA mechanism (see below).
 
dhw: Of course individual cells don't create new organs or organisms. The latter are communities of cells, which is why I keep harping on about cooperation. We don't know how it all works, but if the intelligence in the genome runs the cell, and cells combine to create new organs and organisms, how can you say I am putting intelligence where it does not exist?-DAVID: As long as you put the 'intelligence' in the genome for each cell I am fine. And as long as you recognize the organism as a whole run by its whole DNA I'm fine. -Then we are both fine, and I shall hold you to this for evermore!
 
DAVID: Now I have got to get you to admit that the genome is an amazing coding system, developed by an intelligence that can think and plan.-I would have to be a total idiot to deny that the genome is an amazing coding plan. As for an intelligence that can think and plan, I would gladly admit it if you could tell me how such an intelligence ... a zillion times more amazing than that of the genome, with the ability to create whole universes and the tiniest of microorganisms ... could have come into existence without any sort of prior "thinking and planning". First Cause explains nothing. First cause conscious energy is no more believable than first cause non-conscious energy which evolves into consciousness, or first cause non-conscious energy which strikes lucky. That's where we hit your famous wall of uncertainty, and alas it's too high for me to look over, even if I stand tiptoe on my picket fence (a remarkable balancing act)!