Cambrian Explosion: mutation rate (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 22:29 (4063 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The coding only becomes binding when an innovation works and the cells adopt their respective roles. There have to be the two stages: 1) innovation, 2) perpetuation, always in accordance with the prevailing environment.-DAVID: Do the cells hold a meeting and decide which ones are solid in their roles and which ones are not? Remember I told you a kidney has probably 20-30 different cell types with different functions. I have no idea how they individually decided to adapt their DNA to differing expressions to become each type. And those types must coordinate their functions so the kidney actually works. -You have no idea how they decided, but you know they did not decide. They must coordinate their functions, but you know there is no kind of thought process involved even during innovation.-dhw: Ant colonies must have developed their different engineering works, military strategies, farming techniques etc. from scratch, and each invention required new roles. Ditto the formation of new organs by the cells. I simply do not believe that innovation can be the product of instinct. (That is why your foal is irrelevant.)-DAVID: Unless planned from the beginning. How did instincts develop in trilobites? I should have brought that up in the book. We have de novo forms. Did they arrive instincts intact? And my foal is very relavent. At bith he sees his mother loves me. What is his problem that he runs from me automatically?-One might argue that instincts are examples of cell (or cell communities) exercising intelligence independently of overall conscious control by the organism (hence suckling). My question, though, is how de novo forms are produced in the first place, if not through new types and combinations of cells. Your foal's instinctive fear of you tells us no more about how its liver was invented than a new born babe's instinctive cries tell us about Beethoven's 9th.-DAVID: I view their description as allowing for information in the DNA which drove the changes they assume happened. It all depends upon where and how the information in the DNA came from. You don't like chance and I strongly object to chance, so then what? I choose an information maker who planned for an evolutionary process that was coded for increasing complexity. You want the cells to hold a convention and make decisions. Poppy cock!-What was coded? You can't plant a code in an abstract process ... it can only have been planted in the physical mechanism, which is the cell. It's easy to ridicule the manner in which cells slot into their roles (or invent new ones) by anthropomorphizing them, but that is why the ant analogy is so valuable. No, ants do not gather in a conference room and discuss General Formichael's master plan. But even you must acknowledge that they do have some means of devising and implementing strategies. What I'm suggesting is not nearly as wacky as you would like it to seem. You yourself drew attention to the work of Lynn Margulis, who observed similar "conscious" activities among bacteria. She also wrote: "In my description of the origin of the eukaryotic cell via bacterial cell merger, the components fused via symbiogenesis are already "conscious" entities." As an agnostic, I naturally sympathize with sceptical responses, but I would not dare to call Margulis's research poppycock. Nor would I call your theory of an information maker poppycock, but as I keep emphasizing, you are then faced with these alternatives: either your God preprogrammed every single innovation into the first forms of life (barring the odd dabble now and then) ... plus the environmental changes necessary for them to happen - or he created cells in such a way that they were capable of independent invention as well as self-perpetuation. Margulis's "conscious", cooperating entities offer an explanation of this evolutionary process (whether theistic or not) which surely deserves to be taken seriously by someone who otherwise has "no idea how [cells] individually decided to adapt their DNA to differing expressions to become each type".