Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 22:41 (3761 days ago) @ David Turell

Choice 4): Cell communities combined their intelligence (which may have been invented by your God) to design the liver and the billions of other innovations, as and when environmental change demanded or allowed them.
DAVID: I don't see how these two statements fit together. Original cell intelligence or intelligent information that cells use (in your scenario) to cooperate, can only come from design or by chance. All you have said is 'may have been invented by your God', so does that mean you are excluding chance?-I have emphasized in the same post that “I am interested only in finding a possible explanation for the innovations which have driven evolution from bacteria to humans.” You keep trying to force the issue back to a first cause, but the hypothesis that intelligent cells cooperated to produce innovations does not cover a first cause, any more than Darwin's theory of evolution did.
 
DAVID: And are you excluding the issue that it is a logically enormous stretch that cells write their own plans and then follow them. Kidney cells cannot tell liver cells what to do so that the two organs coordinate. -I have no more idea than you do how the cells managed to combine to form these new organs. I only know that they did. Margulis, Shapiro and Albrecht-Buehler tell us that cells COMMUNICATE. So yes, they may well tell one another what to do - but not in any language that you or I would understand. All organisms - apparently even plants - use their own forms of communication. They could not survive otherwise.
 
dhw: ...you categorically reject divine preprogramming, divine fiddling and random mutations as the force behind this cooperation.
DAVID: No, I've previously said, in complete lack of knowledge, preprogramming is a possibility as is dabbling by God. I don't believe RM & NS are capable of doing the job. As a guess, pre-programming seem to fit more with the concept of God as a first mover.-Sorry, I must have misunderstood your rejection of choices 1) and 2): “None of the above, because simply, I don't know.” However, regarding various hypotheses as a possibility is a good agnostic position. I do wish you'd also consider possible the hypothesis that your God invented an intelligence that could take its own decisions. (Oops, of course you do - but despite Shapiro & Co. you insist that only humans and to a lesser degree some other animals can do that. The rest are automata.)-dhw:The theist can then argue that only God could have designed such an inventively, cooperatively intelligent mechanism, and the atheist can argue that it came about by chance.
DAVID: And you reject chance, making the picket fence your only refuge, on what seems to me to be a binary issue.-ME: How did innovations happen? Maybe intelligent cells cooperated to create them. 
YOU: If so, where did cells get their intelligence from? 
ME: No idea.
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YOU: God made innovations happen.
ME: How did he do it?
YOU: No idea.-Of course I'm on the picket fence. Up here I don't have to believe in things that you and I have no idea about.