Species consciousness and instinct. (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 28, 2013, 17:32 (4044 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: [...]it would be very helpful if you would just explain what innovations and variations you think your God preprogrammed into the very first living things, what kind of choices were left to the individual cell communities (organisms), and how they could choose and yet have no intelligence of their own to allow them to make a choice. A concrete example would be very useful.-DAVID: You should have gathered by now that the use of word automaton implies just that. I'm working theorectically, not precisely, which you keep demanding. I think God gives organisms a little leeway in choice based on stimulus type and intensity. -How can an automaton have "leeway in choice"? With what faculty does it make its choice?-DAVID: To me, evolution looks somewhat like a little trail and error happens, but is mainly directed toward humans. We are obviously not an accident of contingency. [...] I know evolution made six types of eyes. Obviously varying attempts.- Evolution doesn't make anything. Either the cell communities made the eyes, or your God made them. So did he preprogramme them, along with the hundreds of variations? You say "varying attempts", but these are not just attempts. They work. So was each success specially designed by God? Pity poor old Tracey Trilobite, God's Chosen One (her eye was unique), only to find herself jettisoned after umpteen million years.
 
I am indeed demanding precision because you have devised a scenario which doesn't make sense to me. All organisms are composed of cells. From single-celled beginnings life has advanced to colossal communities, from which have "emerged" all the organs and organisms we know today. Dinosaurs had the same extremely complex organs, but the cell communities assembled them in different ways, even though they all shared the same environment. If humans are obviously not an accident of contingency, you can hardly say that dinosaur eyes, teeth, brain etc. WERE an accident of contingency. There has to be a line somewhere between your divine preprogramming and the individual innovations that distinguish one species from another. If cells and cell communities are automatons, there can be no line. They can only obey instructions. Therefore according to your automaton theory ALL individual innovations and ALL species were divinely preprogrammed into the very first cells.-However, bearing in mind that all these different species sprang from fewer and fewer forms, going back in time, your alternative is special creation (God dabbling) or species branching out from their common ancestors through initiatives of their own, sparked off by changes in the environment. Different cell communities taking different directions. If they were not all automatons preprogrammed to do so, and were not specially created, they must have had an internal mechanism that enabled them to work out their own individual, independent ways of coping with or exploiting the environment. Or, to quote a man whose opinions and learning I greatly respect: "the ability to respond with unique answers and [...] some degree of "epigenetic" decision-making." This applies all the way along the line from eukaryotes to trilobites to tyrannosauruses to Turells.