Denis noble debunks neo-Darwinism (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 31, 2013, 16:23 (4102 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Denis Noble stresses cooperation and interaction as major factors in change and in speciation. I heard nothing against the concepts of common descent and natural selection. The whole lecture seemed to be concerned with HOW evolution happens, and with the case against random mutations, 
> If the genome interacts with the rest of the cell, and if their joint interaction with the environment is able to produce inheritable changes (Lamarckism), can anyone seriously doubt that the prime mechanism in evolution is the creative intelligence of the cell?
> 
> This directly echoes the Lynn Margulis quote : cooperation between cells is the key to evolutionary progress, and there is no way you can have cooperation without intelligence. Margulis goes so far as to call it consciousness.
> 
> We do not know where that consciousness originated, and I'd go so far as to suggest we shall never know. The focus here is purely on how evolution works. And it's out with random mutations and the selfish gene, and in with the intelligent cell!-I've summarized your comments and your conclusion. I come away with a slightly different slant. Noble shows the marvelous complexity of the interactions in the cell, the speed of reproduciton of cells, the marvelous feedback mechanisms, the control loops. And you rightly comment about the obvious intelligence at work in the cells in the enormous amount of information being used by the second. It takes just 20 minutes to reproduce a cell. Are these cells autodidacts or puppets given direction? That is the true issue raised. By what mechanism did cells develop to that level of complexity? If not by chance mutation, how?