Denis noble debunks neo-Darwinism (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, September 01, 2013, 18:21 (4101 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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!-DAVID: 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?-You have reproduced my comments and virtually ignored my conclusion! Noble debunks random mutations, but he doesn't tell us by what mechanism cells did develop their complexity. I have gone so far as to suggest we shall never know. His lecture focuses on how evolution works, not on how cells, intelligence, consciousness originated. There are issues and issues. Darwin's Origin of Species doesn't deal with the origin of life and cells either, but that doesn't mean that the subject of evolution itself is not a "true issue".