Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, November 02, 2013, 20:00 (4037 days ago) @ David Turell

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...-DAVID: 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.-What does "life invention" mean? How does life invent? Living materials HAVE life, but any invention or adaptation has to come through and from the materials themselves or from your God if he exists. It's sometimes difficult to know where adaptation ends and invention begins, which is a problem for definitions of speciation, but if all organisms descended from earlier organisms, the unbroken chain between eukaryotes and dinosaurs must have contained countless innovations, all of which you say had to be preplanned and implanted into the earliest forms of life. So you're still stuck with your God having preplanned a whole range of extinct organisms. Yes indeed, pure guesswork. And I'm surprised that biochemical observation can tell you anything about God's plans.-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.-DAVID: 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.-The waters are already muddy, which is why I'm asking for clarification! If you can't imagine how automatons can produce a kidney by choosing unknowingly between a), b) and c), why suggest it in the first place? Why not stick to your God's preprogramming (or special creation) of kidneys and every other innovation into the first organisms? At least it's simpler!-dhw: You are using "experimentation" as if it were somehow separate from the cells and the programmes. What carries out the experiments? .....-DAVID: 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.-The problem is innovation, not some degree of variation. All the new organs and all the new ways of life: preprogrammed from the beginning, or specially created. Or, strangely, some biochemists have actually observed how cells and cell communities communicate and cooperate...but no, perish the thought that they could be anything more than automatons...