Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, November 11, 2013, 22:04 (3818 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Yes, the intelligence is of a kind that exists in a planning process, that I predict will be found in DNA.
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> dhw:So God even preprogrammed the billion and one bacterial adaptations into the first cells, as well as all the innovations leading to humans. It's a wonder they didn't burst.-If you remember the material I presented in the book about first life, the folks who look at such things predicted a very complex first form of cells to really be life. -> 
> dhw:I will say yet again that the distinction between degree and kind is irrelevant to me. I would take it to be the equivalent of a dog's vastly more advanced sense of smell because his nose contains upwards of 125 million sensory cells compared to our 5-10 million. Do you think this gap large enough to argue that dogs are different from us in kind, and therefore God guided evolution towards dogs?-I love your thought process, equating deep thought with deep sniffing. -> dhw: We know our differences, and we know our similarities. Since I neither believe nor disbelieve in God, you can hardly expect me to support your claim that God created life in order to produce humans, and I suspect that is what underlies your hostility towards the intelligent cell hypothesis as well as your insistence on "kind" rather than "degree".-The hostilty is at a deeper level. You refuse to recognize that the intelligence you tout is really intelligent information in DNA, a very different concept than yours. Cells are under control of that information, which then supplies the planning for more complexity. Remembering Gould, who in "Full House" discussed the success of bacteria, who were the start of life and are still here 3.6 billion years later with the biggest biomass on Earth. His excuse for the unnecessary complexity that then appeared in multicellular organisms, was that evolution could only go in one direction, from very simple to complex. Totally illogical because their success does not require developing multicellular complexity. Gould could not think beyond Darwin. To make any sense of it, evolution had to be planned in those first complex single cells. Otherwise there was no reason, even in Darwin's theory, for it to happen.