> DAVID: I am struggling to change your concept slightly: The cells act intelligently because they automatically follow an information program from an intelligent source. That is theistic evolution. That is our only difference in description. 1) and 2) are two parts of the same concept.
> 
> dhw; No, they are not. First of all, as I keep repeating, the second hypothesis is meant only to explain the course of evolution, and it does not touch on the origin of the intelligence. Secondly, your hypothesis has God working everything out in advance, and although you claim not to be trying to read his mind, you have consistently said that his purpose was to produce human beings. Yours is an anthropocentrically teleological concept of evolution. The alternative that I am proposing is an ad hoc evolution, the theistic version of which would be that God created a mechanism that could adapt and invent in accordance with changing environmental conditions, i.e. God had no particular goal in mind, but just wanted to see what his mechanism would come up with (much more entertaining that way). Hence what I call the higgledy-piggledy course of evolution, with all its comings and goings. For this to happen, the cells could not be preprogrammed ... they would have to take their own decisions.-Or they are programmed for decision making that guides evolution to humans and God did have a goal. If we look at what we know, we see that the universe is designed to allow for life. That is a goal oriented observation. Then we see that we appear, and there is no reason why that should happen. The Great apes are happy and unchanged. There must be a teleological reason to invent us. We should have stayed as happy apes, but we didn't. What forced the development? No force is apparent, if we accept the Darwin idea that evolution is a response to challenges. If that statement is not true, we are back to God in control. Or your weasel way of cell invention which is really a far out concoction if you look at actual biochemistry.

dhw: Only humans (so far as we know) have abstract thought and self-awareness, but you deny that you have ever claimed that only humans are conscious. You have agreed that your non-abstract-thinking, non-self-aware dog has a lesser degree of consciousness/intelligence than humans, so you accept the above criteria for animals and even plants, and you can scarcely deny that cells fulfil the same criteria.-DAVID: You continue to confuse the levels. Conscious state involves my dog being aware of his environment, living at my house. I am also consciouus at that level. But I also have consciousness of the type you describe at the human level. Only humans have it. That is why I think we should be classified as a group separate from Primates.-I have never claimed that cells or dogs have the self-awareness of humans. My proposal is that cells have a degree of consciousness/intelligence which when they combine in their billions over billions of years has enabled them to come up with innovations. The innovations are a fact. Nobody knows how they occurred. You think God preplanned every innovation and species and behavioural mode (including your Venus flytrap) into the first few forms of life. I am suggesting that, if he exists, he only created the mechanism that would enable cells to devise their own combinations which led to higgledy-piggledy evolution.
 
dhw: I do not accept any of the hypotheses. I am an agnostic. None of these hypotheses are based on a knowledge of biochemistry. If you think yours is, how do you explain your own claim that 90% of biochemists are atheists?-DAVID: Surveys taken on the higher levels of scientists in research always find 90% are atheists.-And yet you claim that biochemistry supports your God hypothesis. Doesn't the 90% figure suggest to you that biochemistry allows for other explanations?-Dhw: ...Yours is an anthropocentrically teleological concept of evolution. The alternative that I am proposing is an ad hoc evolution, the theistic version of which would be that God created a mechanism that could adapt and invent in accordance with changing environmental conditions, i.e. God had no particular goal in mind, but just wanted to see what his mechanism would come up with (much more entertaining that way). For this to happen, the cells could not be preprogrammed ... they would have to take their own decisions.-DAVID: Or they are programmed for decision making that guides evolution to humans and God did have a goal. If we look at what we know, we see that the universe is designed to allow for life. That is a goal oriented observation. Then we see that we appear, and there is no reason why that should happen. -Nor is there any reason why dinosaurs should have appeared, or the Venus flytrap, or city-building ants. According to you, God also preprogrammed them, and every other innovation you can think of. -DAVID: The Great apes are happy and unchanged. There must be a teleological reason to invent us. -What was the teleological reason for the dinosaurs and the Venus flytrap and the ants? All the comings and goings of evolution fit in perfectly with the scenario of intelligent mechanisms (perhaps created by your God) following whatever course they chose. 
 
DAVID: We should have stayed as happy apes, but we didn't. What forced the development? No force is apparent, if we accept the Darwin idea that evolution is a response to challenges. If that statement is not true, we are back to God in control. Or your weasel way of cell invention which is really a far out concoction if you look at actual biochemistry.-Yes, Darwin saw evolution as a response to a series of challenges, but his theory depends on random mutations followed by Nature selecting those lucky strikes that were beneficial. The "intelligent cell" hypothesis takes randomness out of the equation, and as Margulis argues so potently, puts cooperation at the heart of evolution. This cooperation may not be solely as a result of challenges, because changes in the environment might also lead to new possibilities that are not NEEDED for survival, but enable organisms to find new niches for themselves through innovation. Hence dinosaurs, Venus flytraps, ants, and humans. If challenge was the only motivation, evolution could have stuck at the level of bacteria. This puts cells back in control of evolution, whether God gave them their intelligence or not.

dhw: David, however, insists that cells are automatons, and so whatever innovations they have come up with can only have been preprogrammed by his god. Our difference is therefore not really one of definition at all. It is David's insistence that cells are automatons, and that divine preprogramming is the only explanation for innovations.
DAVID: Agreed.
TONY: David defines them [cells] at the stage that I labeled aware, which is, the ability to detect and act upon things outside of yourself, but not possessing any form of self-identity or the identity of others beyond a purely mechanical state. 
DHW is defining them at the stage that I labeled them at the stage of self-conscious, which is, they are able to reason and plan for the future, which requires abstract thought as well as the awareness of identity of both themselves and others.-Welcome back, Tony. I'm afraid you've missed a great deal of this exchange. David insists that cells/cell communities are automatons descended from automatons descended from automatons etc. that were preprogrammed by his God from the very beginning to produce every possible innovation, adaptation, strategy and lifestyle (his version of theistic evolution) ... unless God intervened personally to make changes (= Creationism). He denies them any awareness. I say they have awareness, the ability to communicate, to cooperate, to process information, and to take decisions. But they are NOT self-aware.-TONY: The ability to learn, remember, recall, communicate, reason, plan, and apply are all far far beyond the scope of simple intelligence.-But according to some scientists (Margulis, Albrecht-Buehler, and others I have cited) who have studied the behaviour of bacteria, they do have the abilities I have listed. "Reason" and "plan" are too close to what you call "abstract thinking", but these single cells appear (I can't be dogmatic) to be able to work out for themselves how to adapt to or exploit any number of conditions. From that, I extrapolate the possibility that evolution got underway when the first cells combined to create multicellularity, and from then on cell communities pooled what I call their "intelligence" to create ever more complex organisms. Every organ is a cooperative cellular community which also cooperates with other cell communities within the same body. No, the "intelligent cell" is not a human being, but it is not an automaton. Put single cells together into vast communities, and what "emerges" (emergence being the theory that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) is an intelligence ultimately extending to the human mind. I have used ants as an analogy to the simpler communities, but I don't want to repeat all the arguments here.-TONY: In David's view on the other hand, the complexity is not much greater than things we are already able to accomplish with fairly basic computer programs. Define a set of tasks, states, parameters, and variables, and then give the instructs as to how to handle them.-Yes, this is a good parallel to David's hypothesis. But the only way it can fit in with the vast spread of the evolutionary bush is if God put the instructions into the FIRST CELLS, providing billions and billions of programmes to be handed down through billions of generations to provide automatic responses to billions of different environments and situations. His alternative is constant intervention. My suggestion is that if God exists, he has provided cells with the "intelligence" to work out their own way of dealing with the billions of environments, challenges and situations that have confronted them throughout the history of life on Earth. Each innovation/ adaptation represents an individual decision by cell communities, thus leading to the colossal variety of life and lifestyles this planet has worked its way through. Do you really believe a fairly basic computer programme inserted into the first living cells could have accomplished this?


> Tony: The reason I make the distinction is actually immensely practical in the discussion. It provides intermediary steps between the cut and dry definitions. Intelligence has to do more with memory and function than it does understanding and reasoning. The ability to learn, remember, recall, communicate, reason, plan, and apply are all far far beyond the scope of simple intelligence. 
> 
> Tony: In David's view on the other hand, the complexity is not much greater than things we are already able to accomplish with fairly basic computer programs. Define a set of tasks, states, parameters, and variables, and then give the instructs as to how to handle them.-Thank you and right on the money.

You stated with similar authority to David's that "the whole house of cards around your intelligent cell falls down" because "the ability to learn, remember, recall, communicate, reason, plan and apply are all far far beyond the scope of simple intelligence". Reasoning and planning are words I would certainly hesitate to use because they are too closely linked to abstract thinking, but I have gone back over the various threads to repeat the scientific support for the concept of the intelligent cell. Here are four quotes from different sources that suggest this is far from being a house of cards:-1) "While the number of bacteria in a colony can be more than 100 times the number of people on Earth, bacteria are twittering (" bacterial twittering" or "chemical tweeting") to make sure they all know what they all doing (by exchanging "chemical tweets"); each cell is both an actor and a spectator in the bacterial Game of Life. Acting jointly, these tiny organisms can sense the environment, process information, solve problems and make decisions so as to thrive in harsh environments. In better times, when exposed to an environment containing abundant nutrients, instead of rushing to exhaust the available resources, as human communities often do, bacteria save for the future and make sure to be prepared for hard times that might befall them in the future."
www.tamar.tau.ac.il/~eshel/html/intelligence_of_Bacteria-html
(I've had trouble getting back to this one.)-2) "So how does a colony of bacteria decide which genetic mutations afford the greatest chance of survival and expansion? Jacob, Becker, Shapira, and Levine, hold that bacteria communicate among themselves, writing, "It is clearly essential to figure out how the bacteria can obtain semantic meaning, so as to initiate, for example, the proper context-dependent transitions between different operating states of the genome (370-371)." Though the researchers do not understand the process(es) by which bacteria code messages and send them, Jacob, Becker, Shapira, and Levine do conceive that bacteria have shared social communicative abilities, which, because of the nature of language, implies a shared knowledge of the semantic meanings of their codes (371). Based on these speculations, it would indeed appear that not only are bacteria sentient (by choosing), and intelligent (by communicating), but that they are also socially organized (but civilized?)."
www.justburrus.blogspot.com/2010/03/bacterial-sentience-intelligence.html-3) MARGULIS: People think that if you can't talk, you can't be intelligent. But you know that's not true if you have a dog. You can communicate with them without talking. If you define intelligence as speaking American English, well maybe they're not. But if you define it in the much more broad sense of behaviors that are modified on the individual level, that involve choice and change and response to the environment, there's every bit of evidence that intelligence is a property of life from the very beginning. It's been modified, of course, and changed and amplified, even, but it's an intrinsic property of cells.
www.astrobio.net/interview/211/bacterial-intelligence-4) Shapiro: 40 years experience as a bacterial geneticist have taught me that bacteria possess many cognitive, computational and evolutionary capabilities unimaginable in the first six decades of the 20th Century. Analysis of cellular processes such as metabolism, regulation of protein synthesis, and DNA repair established that bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus. Studies of genetic recombination, lysogeny, antibiotic resistance and my own work on transposable elements revealed multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules. Examination of colony development and organization led me to appreciate how extensive multicellular collaboration is among the majority of bacterial species. Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell-cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of "higher" plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/2006.ExeterMeeting.pdf
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/bacteria.html-You might also care to google Guenther Albrecht-Buehler, who has written a book on the subject.

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