Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 12, 2013, 19:03 (4027 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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. -No argument there. But I do jib at the idea of your God preprogramming those first cells with billions of essential (for you) adaptations and innovations, when a single mechanism could have produced all the variations of evolution.
 
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?
DAVID: I love your thought process, equating deep thought with deep sniffing.-But I do not love your editing. It was the large human brain that was the equivalent of the dog's 125 million sensory cells, i.e. if God preprogrammed such an extraordinarily complex brain (or stepped in to make it separately), he must have done the same with such an extraordinarily complex nose. This is just one example among the hundreds you yourself have given us in which organisms come up with unique features or modes of behaviour. That does not mean a Venus flytrap has the same intelligence as Einstein. -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".-DAVID: 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. -When we say humans are intelligent beings, we don't separate them from their brains. DNA is part of the cell! You say all the information and preplanning is contained within the DNA. I substitute "the intelligent mechanism", and if that is in the DNA, so be it. You have absolutely no way of knowing whether all the information and planning is processed by an automatic machine obeying God's instructions, or an independent intelligence (possibly invented by your God, and as "touted" by numerous scientists I have cited) making its own decisions. Nor do I, of course, but I am merely considering alternatives. -DAVID: 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.-We have both made the same point over and over again, and it gives just as much support to my alternative as it does to your God theory. The crucial change came when some cells decided to cooperate. That left lots of cells staying as they were, and others experimenting ... just as humans do. And one experiment led to another, as different communities of cells created different forms of life. No Gouldian "could only go in one direction", no Turellian "God planned it all". Cooperation is the key, and it does not in any way shut out your God, who could have given cells their ability to cooperate in the first place. It only shuts out your notion that God planted a few billion innovative and adaptive programmes into the first few cells.