Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Friday, August 08, 2014, 19:54 (3543 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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. [...] One cannot make a kidney by hunt and peck. The Cambrian had full-blown kidney function. It implies a full-blown plan.-God “stepped in” (as opposed to organisms inheriting kidney plans he'd placed in the first living cells billions of years back) presumably means he grabbed hold of various existing organisms and fiddled around with their cell communities (organs) so that he could turn some of them into kidneys. This process would have to apply to all the complicated organs that make spiders, dinosaurs and chimpanzees so very different from bacteria. And since you insist that humans are different in kind and not degree from all other creatures, it's pretty clear that you see us as another instance of your God “stepping in”. (Later you write: “I think that is one of the challenges He gave us when He supplied giant brains.” Perhaps you imagine him manufacturing kidneys and brains in his lab up in the sky and then descending to earth and supplying them to a few kidneyless dinersoreasses, and a few mini-brained chimps.) In short, you believe in microevolution but not in macroevolution. This is not what you call theistic evolution but Creationism (though without the biblical implications of the term). And yet you say: "It certainly appears we evolved", and your version "fills all the holes and confusion for me..."
 
DAVID: 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. -I agree that we have to work backwards, and although I understand (and partly share) your scepticism concerning the inventive powers of cellular communities, I do not understand why you say it doesn't fit the history. You have as much right to question whether cells could have done it as I have to question the existence and the hypothetical methods of your “universal intelligence”, but both theories offer precisely the same explanation of the Cambrian - namely, intelligent design.