Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 12:28 (4058 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You accepted all the criteria I listed as being appropriate for animals and plants, but even though they applied equally to cells (e.g. the ability to process and exchange information, communicate with other organisms, take decisions etc.), you excluded them for no reason other than the fact that you believe cells to be preprogrammed automatons.-DAVID: Cells do not have abstract thought or self-awareness. They work automatically. note how far my agreement goes.-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. Therefore your argument is that, although cells fulfil the criteria by which you can judge animals and plants to be conscious but less conscious than humans, cells are not conscious. You just happen to know that.-dhw: We are going round in circles. You assume that the huge communities of cells which can cooperate in order to produce consciousness (you don't know how) can't produce new organs ... although even with your divine preprogramming this is precisely what they do.-DAVID: No they don't do it by themselves. They follow s program handed to them. Take a bunch of workers to a pile of lumber and ask for a house. They will ask you for plans.-They still cooperate to produce new organs. The process and result are the same. In my alternative hypothesis, just as ants come up with their effective strategies (see my post under "Cell Memories"), cells work out their strategy through their billions of combined intelligences. That's called emergence. As with consciousness, we don't know how it works. You accept the latter, so why not accept the possibility of the former?-dhw; So your God's preprogramming of every organ and every innovation you can think of is the only reasonable hypothesis. I wonder how many biochemists agree with you.-DAVID: Most biochemists (90%) are atheists. You are back to Darwin.-You have claimed that your knowledge of biochemistry supports your belief that God preprogrammed the earliest forms of life to produce all the innovations throughout evolution. Clearly, then, 90% of biochemists disagree with you. But even they are not back to Darwin, because Darwin was an agnostic who insisted that his theory was not incompatible with religion. This does not rest on the one hypothesis that God must have preprogrammed the whole caboodle. If God created the mechanism that enabled all forms of life to evolve from one or a few, there is no conflict with theism. The conflict is only with the biblical version of creation.
 
dhw: You may propose that God preprogrammed it all, someone else may propose that God gave cells (and humans) the ever evolving ability to invent things for themselves, someone else may propose that the ability evolved of its own accord, and someone else may propose that it all began with a huge stroke of luck. Proposals of this nature do not arise from knowledge of cellular biochemistry ... they are all speculative hypotheses to explain the inexplicable.-DAVID: Yes all speculation, but if you try to compute the odds for each of these based on a knowledge of biochemistry, arising as an 'ability evolved of its own accord' or 'stroke of luck' bringss us back to chance which even you will not accept.-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?