Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, November 25, 2013, 14:24 (4015 days ago) @ David Turell

SHAPIRO: This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.-DAVID: I looked at his abstract:
"bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus. Studies of genetic recombination, lysogeny, antibiotic resistance and my own work on transposable elements revealed multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules."
DAVID: You are cherry-picking. This clearly shows thre are a multiplicity of organized systems to be used by the plans in DNA.-Where does he say that the monitoring and computing are carried out automatically by plans that God had already planted in DNA? It's clear from the next quote that he sees these as intelligent actions:-SHAPIRO: "The selected examples of bacterial "smarts" I have given show convincingly that these small cells are incredibly sophisticated at coordinating processes involving millions of individual events and at making them precise and reliable. In addition, the astonishing versatility and mastery bacteria display in managing the biosphere's geochemical and thermodynamic transformations indicates that we have a great deal to learn about chemistry, physics and evolution from our small, but very intelligent, prokaryotic relatives."-DAVID: Supports me!!! It is all chemistry and physics!!!-You can use as many exclamation marks as you like, but they won't alter the fact that bacteria USE chemistry and physics to coordinate sophisticated processes involving millions of individual events. You seem to think that any mention of chemistry makes the user of that chemistry an automaton!
 
dhw: Nowhere in this article have I found a single mention of the word automaton. The nearest is the following: "......conventional wisdom is an extension of the mechanistic views that came to dominate biological thought in the early years of the 20th Century." His article is opposed to this conventional wisdom. Another of your supporters letting you down?-DAVID: Not at all. What he is describing are the epigentic mechanisms that push evolution as described in his book. His statement is exactly on the money, based on my knoweldge of the material in his book. The ID folks love him.-So he is opposed to the mechanistic view but supports your view that cells are automatons, which apparently he defines as very intelligent, sentient beings. Some ID folks may love him, but Dembski doesn't. He attacks Shapiro's theory of Natural Genetic Engineering, and interestingly he writes: "Shapiro believes that cooperative behavior is a fundamental organizing concept for biological activity at all levels of complexity." http://evolutionnews.org/2012/01/is_james_shapir_2055551.html 
This ties in neatly with a description of Shapiro's book which I found elsewhere: 
"Cells, according to Shapiro, are intelligent in that they do their own natural genetic engineering, taking existing structures through horizontal DNA transfer or symbiogenesis, say, and reworking them in new contexts for new uses." 
Just in case you might think "natural" refers to your God preprogramming these cell-mediated processes, read this from an article in the Huffington Post (can't give you the reference, as it eventually froze my computer!): -"In order to be truthful, we must acknowledge that certain questions, like the origins of the first living cells, currently have no credible scientific answer. However, given the historical record of science and technology in achieving the "impossible" (e.g., space flight, telecommunications, electronic computation and robotics), there is no reason to believe that unsolved problems will remain without naturalistic explanations indefinitely."-He certainly isn't pushing divine design, is he? And in view of his repeated and absolutely explicit comments about cellular intelligence, I'd suggest that his view of evolution is considerably closer to my hypothesis than to yours. But my main aim in quoting all these different scientists is to show that there is plenty of scientific support for the concept of the intelligent cell, which you claimed ran counter to our knowledge of biochemistry. Conversely, you still haven't come up with any scientific support for a theory you yourself have described as being entirely of your own making.