Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, December 21, 2013, 19:36 (3772 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: What's wrong with preplanning?
> 
> Despite the conclusions of many scientists in the field, you find it incredible that cells should be regarded as intelligent beings. And yet despite the lack of any evidence or support from the scientific community, you are prepared to believe that your God inserted into the first few living cells billions of programmes that had to be passed down through billions of generations of cells and cell communities to cover virtually every innovation, lifestyle, strategy throughout the history of evolution ... from kidneys to fire-ant rafts to Swahili. (The only alternative you are prepared to consider is that your God popped in to teach cells how to make kidneys, fire ants to make themselves into rafts, and various African tribes to speak Swahili.) I just find the scale and the inconsistencies of your divine preplanning hypothesis beyond the bounds of credibility ... but I guess that's faith for you.-To add to this, it seems to me that David is arguing that the very first cells in existence, had within them the genetic coding that would eventually become human intelligence. To me... this stretches credibility as well. Why did only some of those original cells eventually become human, and not all? This hypothesis begs the question, why we haven't seen humanlike intelligence arise in other kinds of creatures then--or even plants! (Remember, we ultimately share a single common ancestor.) -We have witnessed the seeds of human capability in our nearest ape neighbors. We haven't witnessed these seeds everywhere we would look, which if life was designed with human intelligence in mind from the beginning, we would expect to see it manifested in many more creatures than we do. No... our luck is too specific. Mathematics dictates that a common factor be present in everything. -I think evolution alone is sufficient, and that the rapid advances we've seen in humanity is perhaps that we were the first ones to exhibit behaviors that allowed advantages that were written right back into our genome. Once social behavior began to develop, it created an evolutionary paradigm shift. The only intelligence necessary to explain man's jump is his own: an intelligent being can sidestep the automata of nature and begin to quite literally select on himself and his kin. (In the evolutionary sense.) -I haven't started it yet, but E.O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth" argues that the dominance of humans as well as the dominance of ants and bees is precisely due to our similar adoption of social behaviors.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"