Natures wonders: making spider silk (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 13, 2014, 23:13 (3753 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: My hypothesis is an alternative, not a belief: God may or may not exist, God may or may not be in there, and God may or may not have invented the autonomously intelligent cell, if it exists as such. But your comment admits the possibility of cells doing their own unpreprogrammed, undabbled-with inventing, provided we say that their form of intelligence is part of God's intelligence, and by God you mean a single universal mind.
DAVID: Now you see the light. A little bit of God in every cell allows Him to control evolution. That makes sense.-Then you can no longer claim that cells must be automata, since each one contains its own share of your God's intelligence.
 
dhw: Cells and even particles have their own individual, autonomous forms of intelligence, and they combine to create more and more complex forms of intelligence, so that by a process of emergence through billions and billions of years, the particles of the universe and the cells of living organisms have evolved to their present state of complexity. Some people believe these billions of combined intelligences are all one, and they call it “God”.
DAVID: Now you are off the deep end again. Complexity requires planning and coordination. Tell me how that works in your scheme, not simply repeating an amorphous 'combining to create' pipedream. As you cook a lovely sea bass for dinner, does the fish tell you how to do it?-If you can believe that a little bit of your universal intelligence is in every cell, you can believe that lots of little bits of it can plan and coordinate. There is nothing amorphous about “combining to create”. Every single one of your Nature's Wonders illustrates the point. Cells HAVE to combine if organs are to work. What is “amorphous” is our not knowing the mechanism or how it works, but it is hardly less amorphous to call the mechanism “God”, which you are now prepared to do.-The cells of my brain are quite separate from those of the lovely sea bass. They combine their intelligence to tell me how to cook it, and they even communicate with other cell communities in my body to take it across to the oven and then to the dinner table and then to my digestive system. And because they are “my” cell communities and nobody else's, their unique combination gives me “my” identity.