Natures wonders: making spider silk (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 17:58 (3747 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: As regards your initial "no", you always talk as if somehow the genome were separate from the cell. I have said before that I am perfectly happy to accept the idea that the “brains” of the cell are somewhere inside the genome, but just as we say humans are intelligent, and not humans' brains are intelligent, I don't see why you need to make this distinction. Nor do I see why you have to introduce a “set of rules”, which seems to hark back to your preprogramming. -I should have said self-reinventing. In comparing human brains to cells, in a way of looking at cell intelligence, we really do not know how brains become conscious or develop intelligence. All we know is those attributes reside in the brain somehow and emerge somehow. Cells are under automatic controls. That is quite clear to me from my reading. And I'm not reintroducing preprogramming. The idea of an inventive mechanism available to the organism is an excellent suggestion. Simple cell responses don't explain the Cambrian gap.-> dhw: Of course there are limitations to what all organisms can do, but if your God (or chance, or panpsychist intelligence) created a mechanism that did its own inventing, then it did its own inventing. Again I would draw the parallel with human intelligence. -I'm not sure a parallel is warrented.-> dhw: If I accept your location of the cell's intelligence as being the genome, I would phrase your comment as follows: Cells are directed to cooperate by an inventive mechanism in the genome that responds to changes in the organism's environment. 
> -An excellent statement, which fits my requirements. I think such a mechanism is hidden there capable of the giant jumps in organismal complexity. If we don't find it, then God dabbling comes back to haunt me.