Natures wonders: making spider silk (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 16:25 (3746 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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.-The point I'm trying to make is that human brains ARE cells, but we don't know how these particular cells become intelligent, just as we don't know how other cell communities become “intelligent”, i.e. capable of inventing spider silk and kidneys, as human brain cells have invented motor cars. (I put the word in inverted commas so as not to equate cellular intelligence with human intelligence. They have to be very different - just as you say your God's intelligence must be different from ours. Neither should be anthropomorphized.) Of course simple cell responses don't explain the Cambrian. But an inventive mechanism inside the genome of the cell, or rather the genomes of the cell communities of which all organisms consist, does explain it. In response to environmental change, the inventive mechanism within cells/cell communities brings about cooperation between the cells to produce something new, either to cope with the change or to exploit it.
 
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. 
DAVID: I'm not sure a parallel is warrented.-This was in response to your claim that the inventive mechanism had to follow a set of rules. My point is that the inventive mechanism that creates new organs and “Nature's Wonders” would be no more subject to “rules” (other than the constraints of Nature) than the inventive mechanism that creates motor cars and computers. Hence the enormous variety of innovations and wonders.
 
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.
 
DAVID: 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.-So too would you be haunted by the extraordinary concept of the first few cells being programmed with every single wonder and innovation throughout the history of evolution.