An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, September 01, 2014, 13:01 (3734 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The problem is you do not understand how I view things. You and I think of functioning cells from very different viewpoints. The unicellular organisms that Shapiro studies are very much on their own. They have to take care of their whole 'self' and have more latitude from their genome in adaptations than cells in a complex multicellular organism. What Shapiro studies is primarily much different than looking at a kidney cell.-This is a misunderstanding of the whole concept. It is believed that evolution started out with single cells. At some point these combined to form multicellular organisms. Of course single cells only have to look after themselves (though actually they also help one another), and multicellular organisms need to cooperate, which is why I have always bracketed cells and cell communities together. If you begin with the premise that single cell organisms have a built-in intelligence (which embraces sentience, cognition, information processing, decision-making, cooperativeness), once they get together in communities they will use all of those attributes to enable their communities to function. The cells in the kidney implement the programme invented by the inventive mechanism within the community of cells that first recognized the need for kidneys. This would have taken place within an existing organism (if you believe in evolution), which means that all the cell communities within the whole organism would have had to reshuffle themselves, in the same way as any community has to adapt to changes within itself. A dabbling God would have had to perform exactly the same operation, unless he created every new organism separately from scratch, i.e. he would have had to insert his readymade kidney into an organism, and adjust the rest of the creature's body accordingly. Preprogramming would have had to follow precisely the same course. All the cell communities would have had to be preprogrammed to accommodate the new invention. Your objections on grounds of complexity apply to all the hypotheses, once you try to work out how “God did it”.
 
DAVID: The variety of cells in a human are not independent. They are responsible to their brothers in an organ and also to outside signals for cooperative changes in cellular product output for the whole organism with its different parts.-Agreed. The intelligence within the cells/cell communities enables ALL the cell communities to work together. That is what is meant by cooperation, a key term for this whole concept.-DAVID: A cell in this circumstance is not like a human with a brain. This is a comparison you keep using. It is not a true comparison. The cell in a multicellular animal is a tightly controlled factory, just like an auto factory run by computers. The computer is in the genome and its translation parts. Feedback controls are in place to reduce error to almost zero. These cells have very little latitude. In this instance, it is impossible to understand the appearance of a new species through cell community action.-In a multicellular animal like a human, you cannot talk of “the cell” alone, because the animal is a collection of different cell communities. The vast majority of the cells in cell communities are exactly as you describe: they obey instructions. The inventive mechanism (if it exists - I am offering a hypothesis) is what you are calling the computer, which is in the genome, and the genome is the genetic complement of the cell or the cell community. But I don't like the computer image, because computers have to be programmed. I call it “intelligence”, and I do not understand why you insist on talking of it as if it were not part of the cell/cell community. If it's within the genome, it's part of the cell community! That is where the instructions come from, in the same way as instructions come from the human brain to the rest of the community that constitutes a human being.-To pursue the analogy one step further: you believe your God gave man free will, so presumably man was not preprogrammed to invent the motor car. Maybe man has inherited that inventive freedom from the intelligence your God built into our first ancestors - he gave them the ability to invent. We invent machines outside ourselves, and cells/cell communities invent things inside themselves.
 
I shall try to answer the points re polymorphism in my response to Tony.