Genome complexity: pseudogenes (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, August 30, 2013, 15:06 (4104 days ago) @ David Turell

1) dhw:The intelligent cell/genome would be sufficient to explain the innovations that drive evolution and cause the "punctuated jumps".
DAVID: Your major problem is not being able to explain where the intelligence came from. In the past you have conjured it up. It just magically appears.-2) dhw: So how does ENCODE lead to the failure of common descent and natural selection as an evolutionary paradigm? Or do you now agree that it doesn't?
DAVID: It doesn't because I add God's planning. -3) dhw: [...] If Margulis is right, and bacterial cells "as already 'conscious' entities" merged to create the eukaryotic cell, you can extrapolate a whole purposeful pattern of evolution from this one advance, but it does not need to be God-driven. The drive can come from within. And so if there is no such thing as junk DNA, that is because organisms inevitably retain what is useful as they fulfil their own purposes. This may be a blow to atheism, but it is not a blow to evolution, which as you yourself have confirmed is perfectly compatible with belief in God.
DAVID: Your comment is left intact, so I can point out that again you are magically inserting comments like: " the drive can come from within' and "they fulfill their own purposes". Sounds to me a single-celled eukaryote has a little planning brain. Yes, teleology is everywhere you look, and you want that by chance also.-Your own comments are also left intact, because they all quite rightly point to my inability to explain the source of intelligence, of consciousness, of "little planning brains" (Margulis's "conscious entities"). And they point to the same gaping hole in your own fantastic scenario, as follows:-4) DAVID: (under "Quantum zeno effect") God is basically in the quantum realm and is concealed, but as a result he is part of everything and is running everything. 
dhw: Do I detect a certain nebulous quality in the word "basically"? Is God concealed in the quantum particles of my brain, running everything? If so, goodbye to free will. 
DAVID: A certain nebulosity has to appear. God is concealed and cannot be absolutely proven, but God gave us free will.-ALL scenarios have to be nebulous, because NOBODY knows the source of intelligence ... and that includes the source of your God's intelligence. Every argument you level against atheistic reliance on chance or the atheistic version of panpsychism can be levelled against your unknown, unknowable, "concealed" Universal Intelligence. No matter how authoritatively you state where God is, what he does, what he intends, and no matter how definitively you invoke your hollow, philosophical magic formula of "First Cause" (hollow because it can just as easily be unconscious as conscious), the basis of your speculations is no more and no less nebulous than that of other fantasies. No, they cannot be "absolutely proven". Nor can they even be "proven". What I have offered is merely an alternative fantasy to your own. I do not believe or disbelieve either of them. I can only sit on my fence and marvel at how theists and atheists ask each other precisely the same question ("Where did it all come from?"), and then criticize each other for their equally blinkered visions, though they end up with precisely the same answer: "We don't know." Or rather more grandly: "A certain nebulosity has to appear."