Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 18:07 (4016 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Dembski confirms that Shapiro sees cooperation between intelligent cells as a key factor in evolution. Doing their own engineering, reworking existing structures and all Shapiro's other "smart" examples take us far, far away from your theory of preprogrammed automatons.
DAVID: In your view. The cooperation is all planned. Do Dembski or Shapiro describe the method of cooperation? No.-From the Shapiro article I quoted originally: "Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell-cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication..." One of those laboratories came up with the expressions "bacterial twittering" and "chemical tweeting". Like the rest of us, cells use language (i.e. their own means of communication) as their method of cooperation.-dhw: You have so far dismissed the findings of all these different scientists as "metaphors", "poppycock", "kooky", and "woolly liberal". Is it not possible that during their many years of research they have seen something you haven't?
DAVID: No. I've read most of their material and I still interpret your insistence on making it sould like they are really thinking and planning as overreaching.-Perhaps that is because you like to use words like "think" and "plan", since they can encompass the sort of abstract thinking that only humans appear to be capable of. Then you can pounce and ridicule the idea of ants holding committee meetings. In the same way you like to pounce on "conscious" and identify the term with human self-awareness, so that cells and ants can be disqualified. Just stick to "intelligence".-dhw: More authoritative statements, as if the cells' intelligent behaviour could not possibly be the result of them actually being intelligent...[Shapiro] concludes that they are very intelligent, sentient beings ... and I suspect you are the only person in the world who would take that to be a definition of automatons. As you say, though, your theory is entirely of your own making!-DAVID: The whole ID community interprets this as I do. you are misreading Dembski and Behe.-The ID community argues that cells are too complex not to have been designed. If the whole of the ID community supports your hypothesis that every single innovation, adaptation, strategy and lifestyle was either preprogrammed in the very first cells or the result of God's dabbling, why do you have to resort to subjectively interpreted "implications" instead of concrete references?
 
DAVID: I've said all along that theistic evolution is either entirely preprogrammed or there is dabbling, and I can't tell which is correct.-Judging by the Catholic version, dabbling fits in with the ID approach. Your problem arises when you insist that God preprogrammed the very first cells to pass on billions of innovations etc. (i.e. the non-dabbling component of your hypothesis). The wonderful example you have given of fire ants organizing themselves into rafts illustrates the point.
 
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24654-fire-ants-writhe-to-make-unsinkable-rafts.html-Read the conclusion to that article:
"The idea of conceptualising a swarm of ants as a smart material is quite imaginative," says Scott Turner at Syracuse University in New York. "They were able to show how each of the units of the material are cognitive, aware of their surroundings and respond with a coordinated set of behaviours. This is opening the door to some really interesting questions."-Interesting indeed. Each ant is cognitive, aware, and able to coordinate behaviours (=cooperate). It conforms perfectly to the intelligent cell concept developed by Margulis, Shapiro, Albrecht-Buehler and various other modern scientists. According to you, though, this is not an option. There are only two possibilities: 1) Your God preprogrammed the very first automaton cells to pass on the raft concept, so that billions of years later (after billions of different innovations, adaptations, lifestyles, strategies) automaton fire ants would automatically carry out God's inbuilt instructions on how fire ants should deal with floods. 2) God peeped out from behind his quantum curtain, saw that the automaton ants were in trouble, and decided to give their little grey cells a tweak so that they would unconsciously, unthinkingly, automatically construct their rafts. Your ants don't have the slightest clue what they are doing. They are not individually cognitive or aware or cooperative, no matter what the researchers may say.