Cell Memories (Identity)

by David Turell , Friday, August 08, 2014, 02:49 (3547 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Further to what I wrote there, the great advantage of this hypothesis is precisely the fact that deliberate invention by communities of intelligent beings would NOT be itty-bitty, except that it might well require experimentation (with many organisms dying). I am using the same argument as you: the explosion can be explained by intelligent design - in this case, though, the intelligence is that of the cells. -Bluntly, cell intelligence is too limited to create the intricate plans required for complicated organs. You theory does not explain the huge gap of the Cambrian Explosion. My theory assumes God stepped in at this point in evolution.- 
> dhw: For cells to be inventive they would need to be “sentient, subjective, cognitive, communicative and intelligent”, all of which qualities our researchers say they have. I have added decision-making to Shapiro's list. -They are exactly as you say but only to a tiny degree of what is needed for complex planning. One cannot make a kidney by hunt and peck. The Cambrian had full-blown kidney function. It implies a full-blown plan. If you are impressed by spiders spinning webs with pH gradients then imagine a number of different gradients in a kidney, all controlled by feedback signals from other organs in the body.
 
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> DAVID: [...] That is exactly why I prefer theistic evolution. It fills all the holes and confusion for me, although I don't know how HE did it. And I think He is challenging us to figure it out.
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> dhw: You cannot fill “all the holes” by saying “God did it” though you still don't know how! Once you accept the theory of common descent, “how” is the biggest of the evolutionary holes!-But yes I can. It certainly appears we evolved. The fossils are in the right order in the layers of the Earth. Is God trying to fool us in this arrangement? No, I fully believe God guided evolution. He knows how, but He has not explained it. As stated before, I think that is one of the challenges He gave us when He supplied giant brains. Try and figure it out. I covered all this in my first book on the subject. Let's admit we both don't know how it works, only that we can see the results of an evolutionary process. Since we know the age of the universe the story in Genesis doesn't work. We must treat it as an allegory, so we are left with life evolving over 3.6 billion years.-And there is so much we do not know. Why and how multcellularity developed when bactera are so successful. Why and how sex developed, because sex requires limited life times, and bactera live forever in sister cells. Some of this suggests a drive built into evolution to create complexity. We have to work backward from what we know about the evolutionary process, and from my viewpoint your theory has no way of fitting the history we have found. Certainly not the Cambrian gap. Life is too complex to be a result of chance tentative, in-the-dark attempts by a bunch of cells with some intelligence.