DAVID: But your IM is just an alternative for God, just as supernatural as God is.
dhw: The IM is absolutely NOT an alternative to God. The IM is an alternative to random mutations, your 3.8 billion-year-divine computer programme, and your divine dabbling. It is a hypothetical explanation of how evolution works, and it leaves open the question of its origin.
DAVID: If the IM explains evolution it requires the ability to plan. It requires a planning mind either as the inventor of the IM or the guider of the IM as you constantly remind us. - I have restored the two initial comments above (in bold), since that was the point under discussion. Your second sentence returns to the origin of the IM, which I have always left open, and then reverts to your own insistence that it requires a guide, whereas I claim it is autonomous (although God can always do a dabble if he feels like it, as suggested in the scenarios of my Denton post on 20 February). We have discussed the “ability” to plan before. Briefly, the IM or “brain” of the cell community would cooperate with other “brains” to respond to the demands of or opportunities offered by the environment - as with adaptation, which is a response and is not preplanned. If your God is as powerful as you believe, it should not be beyond his ability to create a mechanism that can work out innovations (with any necessary planning)as well as adaptations.
 
dhw: As always, I agree with you that the complexity of living forms requires mentation, but once again we must distinguish between the IM and the maker of the IM. As we have discussed ad nauseam, there are some distinguished biologists who inform us that cells are capable of mentation.
DAVID: And as I have replied ad nauseam, automatic cell functions can look just like mentation.
 
I am only explaining that there is scientific backing for the argument that cells are capable of mentation, which means there is scientific backing for my proposal even if you do not accept it. - dhw: That is the basis of my IM hypothesis to explain how evolution works. And so the question then has to be: what made the cell with its IM? Your answer is a single, universal mind (a “magical” God); the atheist answer is chance. I have offered a panpsychist variation, in which materials “magically” acquire sufficient awareness to work together. This may perhaps tie in with BBella's posts regarding Sheldrake's “morphogenic resonance”.
DAVID: You keep scrambling for alternatives. Sheldrake is only pointing out fields: human species consciousness, morphic phenotypic fields which come as part and parcel of the evolutionary process. He never says these do not come from God.

I was following up BBella's revealing comment about “drawing different aspects of information within the field “what Is” together to create the next level of “what Is”, which fits in with my pansychist hypothesis. Most panpsychist theories are actually tied in with some sort of God, but I have suggested one that is not. However, I have acknowledged that it is no more credible (or incredible) than your own God theory or the chance theory of the atheists.

The proteins in a human have been annotated almost completely. Remember proteins are a complex set of molecules and humans have lots of them, and blind evolution found all of them to cooperate and make a human: - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160725105235.htm - "The ability to reliably and reproducibly measure any protein of the human proteome in any tissue or cell-type is transformative for understanding systems-level properties as well as specific pathways in physiology and disease. In the lab of Professor Robert Moritz at ISB, a collaborative effort enabled the generation and verification of a compendium of highly specific targeted proteomic assays by the method called selected reaction monitoring, or SRM for short, now provides quantification of 99.7% of the 20,277 annotated human proteins by the widely accessible, sensitive and robust targeted mass spectrometric method selected reaction monitoring, SRM. This Human SRMAtlas provides definitive assay coordinates that conclusively identify the respective peptide in biological samples. (my bold) - "Although the accomplishment of the Human Genome Project in 2003 in creating an inventory of all human genes, the majority of protein research is still focused on the same relatively small subset of proteins that were explored before the human genome was mapped. To move beyond this stagnated proteogenomic research approach, the development of highly specific assays for essentially every human protein was needed. With a resource such as the Human SRMAtlas, the prospect of measuring any protein is now a reality. The Human SRMAtlas now provides verified MS assays based on SRM technology developed in a uniform and consistent process for essentially every protein of the human proteome. These assays can be rapidly deployed in systems biology and biomedical studies to identify and quantify any human protein with high sensitivity and high selectivity, and to navigate complete proteome maps to understand their biological functions." - Comment: Note the bold: over 20,277 different protein molecules make up a human. All by chance? Never.

Another find is the settlement in British Columbia about 14,000 years ago possibly from Atlantic seamen:

http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/native-canadian-legend-proven-true-with-the-discovery-...

"The Heiltsuk Nation are indigenous Canadians whose ancestors once controlled 6,000 sq. miles (approx. 16,000 sq. km) of coastline in what is now British Columbia. Heiltsuk is also a language family, much like Latin is the root to Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Those among the Heiltsuk Nation today were formerly known as the Bella Bella band (an Anglo mistake for what was actually a geographical feature).
 
"According to their oral history, the Maker set their ancestors down within their traditional territory, before the great flood. Through artifacts uncovered on their lands, we know that modern-day Heiltsuk have been living in the same area for the past 9,700 years. Previous archeological research put them in British Columbia at 1,000 BCE. Until now, there was no proof that they were there before the worldwide flood, mentioned in the Bible and other texts of that day.

"Archaeologists have now proven the Bella Bella Heiltsuk’s legend true. Researchers at the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria, discovered the 14,000 year old settlement. It is thought to have been a refuge for the Heiltsuk’s ancestors during the second Ice Age.

***

"The excavation was meticulous and painstaking, according to Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD student at the University of Victoria, who worked at the site. At first, they discovered a hearth or fire pit approx. 8 ft. (2.5 meters) underground. It still contained some charcoal flakes. They had the slices analyzed. Carbon dating puts them at 13,613 to 14,086 years old. “We were so happy to find something we could date,” she said. Then through more excavation through soil and peat, they found a nearby cache of stone tools.

***

"Some amazing artifacts were found including fishhooks and an atlatl. This was a javelin throwing device. Far older than a bow and arrow, it’s used to increase distance and accuracy. They even found a wooden drill used to start fires. “What this is doing is just changing our idea of the way in which North America was first peopled,” Gauvreau said.

"This discovery deals another blow to the land bridge theory. Today, historians and archaeologists aren’t sure how North America was peopled by its original inhabitance. A previous study found that not enough game or edible plants would've been available on the land bridge, to sustain a trek between Siberia and Alaska. Also, historians placed the date of that crossing at 13,000 years ago. That date alongside this discovery doesn't match up. 

"This finding and others, support the theory that wayfarers came not on land but by sea. “From our site, it is apparent that they were rather adept sea mammal hunters," Gauvreau said.

"Previously, the earliest found artifact, and so evidence of human occupation of the West Coast, was the Manis Mastodon spear tip. It was unearthed on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula and dates back to about 13,800 BCE, which also challenges the land bridge theory."

Comment: Our ancestors really were intrepid travelers. Columbus was not the initial discoverer of North America.

The San Diego mastodon find from 130,000 years ago is disputed:

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49308/title/Paper-Suggesting-Majo...

" If this latest conclusion is valid, it would push the date of the peopling of the Americas back by 100 millennia. “If you are going to push human antiquity in the New World back more than 100,000 years in one fell swoop, you’ll have to do so with a far better archaeological case than this one,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who—like Grayson—was not involved with the study, told Nature.

"Critics have argued that the authors failed to rule out damage caused to the bones by construction equipment or natural causes. But one coauthor, who helped excavate the site, said that the bones were too deep in the Earth to suffer damage from construction machinery rolling across the surface. The mastodon remains and the stones that the authors claimed could have been used as hammers were “deeply buried. . . . There was no equipment damage to the heart of the site,” Thomas Deméré, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, told Science.

"Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist, agreed with other critics, saying that the Nature paper does not contain enough evidence to push back the timeline of hominins’ population of North America. “[The authors] present evidence that the broken stones and bones could have been broken by humans,” he told The New York Times. “But they don’t demonstrate that they could only be broken by humans.'”

Comment: If there were humans on the U.S west coast that long ago, there is no evidence they hung around.

Natural evolution is over. We are now in control:

https://singularityhub.com/2017/03/26/the-rise-of-a-new-species-of-human-being/

"Today, what survives on Earth can be determined entirely by human beings. We can alter the genetics of almost any life form and potentially design entirely new ones.
According to renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, “In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.”

"In their book Evolving Ourselves , Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans describe a world where evolution is no longer driven by natural processes. Instead, it is driven by human choices, through what they call unnatural selection and non-random mutation. As a result, we will see the emergence of an entirely new species of human beings.

"There is no doubt that Enriquez and Gullans describe a powerful tool for accelerating human progress.

***

"There is one evolutionary structure that Darwin and Wallace discovered that applied for four billion years, where random mutation and natural selection continue to occur. But then there is a world where the primary determinant of what lives and dies becomes human beings. This is a world of unnatural selection, because humans would rather have dogs and cats than snakes and grizzly bears. It’s a world where we deliberately insert genes into bacteria, plants and animals for specific purposes. This is a form of intelligent design, and has nothing to do with random mutations.

***

"Even Darwin had difficulty defining species. We have at least 19 different definitions of the term species. Depending on which of these definitions we adopt, it could be much earlier or much later. Already, we are seeing this by controlling our reproduction, which is the core of evolution.

***

"Yes. Most evolution doesn’t work. 99 percent of the species that have ever lived are extinct. Evolution is actually a continuous set of experiments, many of which fail. It would not be surprising to see some things go horribly wrong. That is simply what happens in nature.

***

"....there is a whole series of ways in which you can modify gene expression within the DNA code itself. We can alter the expression of that code. We can modify how the environment interacts with the code. We can modify the metabolism or the microorganisms that execute on that code. We already have instruments at many different levels to modify the expression of that DNA, even if it is written exactly the same way.

"That aside, we are starting to see scientists who are able to create heredity using alternative chemical structures. So we can add or substitute letters to DNA and still have living organisms that inherit in different ways."

Comment: One the basis of this article I think evolution is in our hands and is over unless we engineer more of it.

This branch has been dated, and the burial sites are not more than 300,000 years old, which means hey existed at the same time as when H. sapiens appeared:

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/homo-naledi-likely-existed-alongside-early-human...

"Johannesburg - A year and a half after fossils belonging to the Homo naledi species were discovered, scientists and researchers can now reveal that it is highly likely that the species lived alongside Homo sapiens (early humans).

***

"Homo naledi was alive sometime between 335 000 and 236 000 years ago. This places this population of primitive small-brained hominis at a time and place that is likely alongside Homo sapiens.

“'This is the first time that it has been demonstrated that another species of homonin survived alongside the first humans in Africa,” Berger said.

"Although the Homo naledi fossils shared some primitive features with some of the earliest known members of the Homo genus who lived nearly 2 million years ago, the remains also shared some features with modern humans, he said.

***

"The dates were determined through six independent methods by at least 19 scientists from laboratories and institutions across the world.

"This meant that Homo naledi may have survived for as long as two million years alongside other species of hominins in Africa, the period which paleoanthropologists like Berger describe as the ‘late Middle Pleistocene’.

"Researchers and scientists had previously thought that only Homo sapiens existed on the African continent during that period because the period was characterised by the rise of "modern human behaviour".

"That kind of behaviour was previously attributed to the rise of modern humans and was thought to represent the origins of complex modern human activities such as burial of the dead, self-adornment and complex tools.

“'We can no longer assume that we know which species made which tools, or even assume that it was modern humans that were the innovators of some of these critical technological and behavioural breakthroughs in the archaeological record of Africa."

Comment: What is significant to me is this finding parallels the Hobbit survival in Asia. Primitive hominin forms had the capacity of survival into modern times. Why did one set of branches modernize into Neanderthals and H. sapiens and the others in the bush of types remain more or less static? Was one type preferred by God?