Junk DNA: goodbye! (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 26, 2014, 22:03 (3773 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Then why not acknowledge that the ability of the various cell communities to perceive and process information from the environment, to communicate with other cell communities, to decide which steps are necessary - even to the extent of innovation - constitutes a form of “intelligence”? If the “life plan” has not been preprogrammed, the cell communities must take the decisions themselves. They are therefore not automata.-DAVID: Our only difference is that the biologic systems run under tight controls with feedback loops and other controls. They are engineered to make automatic decisions.-Your first sentence describes all biologic systems including our own and that of those fellow animals to which you are willing to ascribe a mental capacity we call “intelligence”, an essential part of which is the ability to make decisions. However, as usual, you insist that humans and - to a lesser degree - our fellow animals are capable of making their own spontaneous decisions, whereas other life forms from bacteria onwards are automata. THAT is the difference between us.
 
DAVID: Note this discussion of systems biology which fits what I know from my education:-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/07/when_biologists087871.html-It makes a good case for intelligent design. How does it exclude the concept of cells and cell communities designed to make their own intelligent decisions? Once again, let me point out that if the different “life plans” of the fruit flies were not preprogrammed, the cell communities of which the fruit flies are composed must have cooperated in making all the decisions that led to their particular life plan. If those decisions were not preprogrammed, they cannot have been automatic. -Incidentally, the article - like many you have recently quoted on this thread - emphasizes that so-called junk DNA is not junk. An article in today's Guardian reports on the claim by researchers at Oxford University that: “More than 90% of human DNA is doing nothing very useful, and large stretches may be no more than biological baggage that has built up over years of evolution.” As is so often the case, scientists themselves can't agree. Back to the picket fence, everybody!