Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, November 01, 2013, 14:49 (4039 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: I'm trying to track your scenario back to its logical beginnings. You believe that evolution happened, which means that all living creatures descended from earlier living creatures. All living creatures are composed of cells/cell communities. Life doesn't experiment or invent.-I'm glad you are trying to do my thinking for me, but I cannot go as far as you wish. Life is an emergent phenomenon that arises when all the biochemical reactions work in concert. The procedures and plans for adaptation are coded in the DNA, which doesn't just make protein, the original simplistic interpretation.-> dhw: Only the cells from one generation to the next or your God can experiment and invent. You insist that cells and cell communities are automatons which cannot invent anything. Therefore whatever innovations led from pre-dinosaur to dinosaur must, according to your scenario, have been God's invention, i.e. the result of his preprogramming (= planning), unless he directly intervened (= special creation). This is the logical progression of your theistic mode, and it can only mean that he preplanned dinosaurs or created them specially.-I'm glad you are theorizing. All the above is possible, but you have left out life's built-in inventiveness, based on pre-programmed ability to adapt. So there are three ways; pre-planned creatures, special creation, or life invention. One proviso: complex organs have to be planned, so their information must have been implanted by God early on. Obviously this is all guess-work, based on biochemical observation.
> 
> dhw:.....But according to you, cells are incapable of this ... they cannot invent. So your God has to do the inventing for them. How does this fit in with their choosing between a), b) and c)? Do you mean they are stimulated by a "kidney-time" change in conditions, and then unknowingly choose between God's preprogrammed kidney, non-kidney and nothing-like-a-kidney, and succeed or fail accordingly? I'm afraid I still don't understand how you imagine this process works.-Frankly, as indicated above, neiher do I, but non-kidney and nothing-like-a-kidney were never options. That is frivolous thinking to muddy the waters.
> 
> dhw: You are using "experimentation" as if it were somehow separate from the cells and the programmes. What carries out the experiments? .....-I've explained the possible plan for stem cells to provide for some degree of variation. This is the 'experimentation' I mean. After all there must be some room for natural selection to work. Despite religions' expectations for God, I think He allowed life's built-in inventiveness some leeway.