A new theory (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 22, 2013, 16:30 (4204 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It seems to me that if you put all these factors together ... rejection of randomness, interaction between organisms and environment, inheritance of acquired characteristics, communication and cooperation between all the cells and sets of cells ... the picture entails just the sort of mechanism we have been discussing. .......would not this "new theory" suggest that the "intelligent cell" might after all be more accurate terminology than the "intelligent genome"?-DAVID: I don't think the name is important. What comes across is that the cell as a unit and its genome contain a tremendous amount of infomation which is used very efficiently at several levels of activity. It is obvious the cell coordinates its parts, BUT, we still have no idea how species appear. This new knowledge still does not provide an answer, but the Darwin theory of gradualism, in face of this new info, looks much less likely to provide the answer. To paraphrase Dawkins, it is not climing Mt. Improbable that seems to work. It is leaping up the mountain by an unknown process.-You yourself have proposed an answer, which I have named "creationist evolution", whereby your God intervenes in the process of evolution. I too have proposed an answer. I've outlined it again on the thread "Theistic evolution", and it has the great advantage of being compatible both with theism and with atheism. It explains how new organs and species can suddenly appear, why the fossil record has so many gaps, and why evolution has progressed to ever increasing complexity. At the same time, it is compatible with all current scientific research on genetics, epigenetics, interaction between organism and environment, Lamarckism, and cooperation and communication between cells. There is no leap of faith required ... the leap concerns the origin of the mechanism, not the mechanism itself. All hail, then, to the new theory: THE INTELLIGENT CELL.