An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 03, 2014, 22:00 (3516 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: “Those men that tried to fly shared their knowledge. They experimented repeatedly, and failed, leaving evidence of their experiments for others to learn from.[...] Where is the mechanism for transmitting knowledge of failed experiments, and where is the evidence of the failed experiments?”-You are quite right. A failed experiment will have resulted in death, and so the knowledge could not have been passed on. Thank you. (As for evidence, I don't know what sort of fossil a failed experiment would leave behind.) However, a bad analogy doesn't invalidate the general hypothesis. David's cry: “As I have pointed out to him, he is humaninzing those cels with a brain somewhere” is a travesty, as I've repeatedly warned against anthropomorphization, and I use the human brain as an analogy. We don't know how your God thinks, or how other organisms think, and David's efforts to trace the chemical processes of cellular “thought” are no different from neuroscientists attempting to explain human thought in the same terms.
 
TONY: The idea of progressive evolution through innovation is also just speculation without evidence. [...] We are trying to explain something that we have not observed but speculate about with theoretical processes that we have not observed but speculate about. -Agreed, and speculation applies just as much to your theories about God as it does to any other hypotheses. This is where it gets interesting. David believes evolution happened through innovation (so do I), and for him that means God preprogramming every single innovation into the first living cells. You clearly favour dabbling (= creationism). I'll go along with theism for the sake of this discussion, and offer a third option: God created a mechanism capable of doing its own inventing. (I have the same objection to your “creative”, David, as to your “inventive”. A creative mechanism does not simply obey instructions. Why not stick to preprogramming?) I presume neither of you consider your God incapable of creating such a mechanism, since you believe he's already done so: in David's case, by preprogramming human intelligence into the first living cells, along with spiders' webs and every other multicellular organism and apparatus you can think of, and presumably Tony, you think he created humans separately, along with different species (spider/dragonfly/dog/alligator). Perhaps you and David can explain why you don't like each other's speculative hypotheses.-TONY: When we see a multitude of examples that are virtually unchanged since the Cambrian, just exactly which part of this [= David's preprogramming of every single innovation] is fanciful? It is only fanciful if you believe in species divergence via evolution, which we have absolutely no evidence for, only speculation.-It's the Cambrian that we are trying to explain, and you don't believe David's explanation either, since you reject evolution by innovation. I'll leave you to fight that out between you.
 
DHW: The dabble theory is just as fanciful. 
TONY: Well, it is less fanciful than saying that a cluster of cells first conceived the concept of a string/web, then the concept of shooting said web out their rears, then invented the concept of silk that is stronger than steel, then performed the chemical engineering to figure out how to make it [etc.] -I'd like to reproduce this in its entirety because it's so beautiful, but space is limited. Thank you. The complexity of all living things is a major factor in my inability to embrace atheism. But even if I believed in God, (a)I would find it difficult to conceive of such a programme being inserted into the first living cells, along with the zillions of other programmes that have led from single cells to humans (David's preferred hypothesis). I have equal difficulty imagining your God painstakingly and - presumably - psychokinetically manipulating globules of matter to separately create the process you've so beautifully described, along with every other such process and every different species (although apparently he did install a mechanism to allow cell communities to organize variations within the same species). You may argue that what I can imagine is no test of truth - but where's the evidence for these hypotheses? All three explanations are speculations, and I'm the only one of us three who doesn't actually believe in any of them.
 
dhw: Therefore there are gaps in our knowledge, and your theory depends just as much as mine on speculation as to what lies in those gaps.
DAVID: True, but my problem with your theory is that you are giving properties to cells taht I know they do not have and are not capable of using. -You do not know this. You believe it, just as you believe your God's all-encompassing computer programme will be found hidden somewhere in the cells: "You have sidestepped the issue of is the genome really a computer or not. Tony and I say it is. It is programmed [...] You have said roughly, your theory can't work if the genome is a computer.” Agreed, but I have not sidestepped it. I have proposed a mechanism that does its own inventing, and a computer that merely obeys instructions cannot do its own inventing. Your theory attempts to explain evolution by preprogrammed innovation, which Tony does not believe in, so I don't see how you can claim he is on your side. But he will certainly speak for himself.-.