Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 17, 2013, 14:17 (3834 days ago) @ David Turell

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.