Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 14:31 (4020 days ago) @ David Turell

I am combining responses on this thread, as "Different..." and "All Alone" cover the same ground.-dhw: We only know that the information is there. We don't know how it got there. ALL explanations depend on faith.
DAVID: We can only look at what we observe within ourselves: only intelligence can produce organized information such as we find in DNA. You have to be willing to take your thinking that far. And then some of us can make the leap, and you don't want to.-I see no good reason to take the leap. The ground on both sides of the fence is full of deep holes.-dhw: How many researchers do you know of who believe that the first living cells contained billions of programmes that were handed down over billions of years to billions of different organisms, to enable single cells to evolve into humans?
DAVID: Paul Davies for one. See my recent entry. -http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/opinion/are-we-alone-in-the-universe.html?nl=todayshe...-DAVIES: "The underlying problem is complexity. Even the simplest bacterium is, at the molecular level, staggeringly complex."
 
No argument from me. No support for you (see below).-Dhw: If [God] didn't preprogramme all the species and all the means of coping with all the different environments and all the different problems, and coming up with one out of all the different choices, he actually intervened personally. You can almost hear Chuck chuckling.
 
DAVID: That is a fairly accurate statement of my suppositions. The reason Chuck would chuckle is he invented a supposition that is falling apart, because he didn't have the knowledge to know any better. Completely eliminate him from your thinking, start fresh and you will end up like I am, accepting the fact that we evolved, but we are still learning how it was done and we are discovering amazing complexity and an intricate coding system filled with enormous amounts of information, the source of which we must guess at.-Yes, we're still learning how it was done (you and I disagree with Darwin about random mutations), and we don't know the source of the coding system (Darwin said he didn't either), and yes to your claims of amazing complexity. But amazing complexity does not have to mean billions of computer programmes passed on from the first automated cells to subsequent automated cells to produce billions and billions of innovations, lifestyles, strategies etc. A cell with its own form of intelligence would also have to be amazingly complex. At least I can quote some scientists in the field who support that idea. You cite Paul Davies as supporting you, but I can find no mention of your divine preprogramming-plus-dabbling anthropocentric theory (do please give me a reference), and he doesn't even accept your attack on Darwin. Here are two quotes from the article you recommended in support of your argument: -DAVIES: "Darwin gave us a powerful explanation of how life on Earth evolved over billions of years, but he would not be drawn out on the question of how life got going in the first place. "One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped."
DAVIES: "Although the pathway from microbes to complex thinking beings like humans may still be a very difficult one, at least we know the mechanism whereby it happens — Darwinian evolution."-Davies accepts that evolution happened, and so do you. Why, then, this constant sniping at Darwin? What else apart from random mutations and gradualism makes you so hostile?