An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 11:34 (3725 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 12:04

DAVID: One major issue is a definition of "cellular communities" (CC's) needs to be carefully delineated and your use of it seems amorphous to me. As an example, if a primitive kidney needs to add a new function, do the kidney community cells do the planning? [...]. Or by CC's do you intend to mean whole organisms with all their organs and brains? We know that whole guppies can change size when necessary. Can they change their kidneys by themselves. I doubt it.-Organs are cell communities, and organisms like ourselves are a community of cell communities. When innovations occur, all the cell communities within an organism must change and cooperate in order to accommodate the new community. Where does the planning come from? Tell me where in the genome your God has hidden his 3.7-billion-year-old computer programme, and I'll tell you where the planning comes from. ALL these hypotheses are pure speculation. Yes, guppies adapt. And whatever mechanism enables this to happen has not created totally new species within the period of human observation. Does this mean your God has stopped messing about with his computer programmes (hypothesis 5), or his 3.7-billion-year-old programme has come to a temporary halt (hypothesis 4), or the inventive mechanism he may have planted in the first cells has stopped inventing (hypothesis 6)? (Please see also my response to Tony.)-dhw, As an evolutionist, you do not doubt that the innovations happened, but you believe they were preprogrammed into the very first cells (4) or progressively directed by God (5)
DAVID: I still hope an inventive or more complex modification mechanism will be found to get me out of my dilemma, but it all may be up to God all the time.-An inventive mechanism is hypothesis 6. Hypotheses 4 and 5 involve God and not the mechanism doing the inventing. We all have a dilemma, and I'm sure all believers and non-believers hope their hypotheses will prove correct.
 
dhw: I would like to go back, not to an innovation, but to one of Nature's Wonders which I love to use as an analogy. Fire ants cooperate to make themselves into a floating raft, which enables them to survive floods. 
DAVID: Not clumps of cells.-No, I said it was an analogy.-DAVID: I use instinct of whole animals. These comments bring up the need for another clarification. What is instinctual behavior and how does it happen? [...] My theory about instinct is that when the pattern is learned over and over, eventually brain plasticity allows it to stick, and it is somehow put into the neuron's DNA as instinct. This actually is the general theory of how it works.-But it is not a theory about how new forms of behaviour are invented.-DAVID: So, ants live on the ground; they get flooded over and over; ants are a cooperative society, and while swimming around several of them try to save each other and while they are clinging together they discover they float easily. They have brains and learn by experience.-Yes, they have brains, and yes, they learn, and yes they pass on what they learn. And so according to your explanation, God did not preprogramme them and God did not intervene. They worked it out for themselves. That is why I like the analogy!-DAVID: On the other hand an isolated organ cell community without a planning brain can do almost nothing. For much of evolution the huge jumps in complexity, which you fully recognize, require planning from a brain or a consciousness. Back to the need for God.-I agree that organs can't function without some kind of a brain, but that should not be equated with the human brain. I prefer “intelligence”. And I agree that the huge jumps require intelligence and cooperation between all the cell communities in the organism in which the jumps take place. Just like my ants, eh? So we're back to your 37-billion-year programme, your God messing about with his programmes, or your God having installed an inventive mechanism within the cells themselves. I know you discount the latter, but you are not really happy with your own alternatives, are you? Just hoping... -dhw: I was also fascinated by your reference to a man born without a corpus callosum in his brain.
DAVID: Easy answer: God gave our brains plasticity. We know that. Many young children who have their brain separated like this fellow, to cure severe epilepsy, often function perfectly well. The same is true of some children born with a shell of the brain, can function at high levels of IQ.-Easy when you say it quickly. What does brain plasticity mean? The brain is composed of cells. If the behaviour of those cells is flexible enough in some cases to compensate for abnormalities, but not flexible enough in other cases to cope with the same abnormalities, doesn't that suggest that the brain cells themselves vary from one organism to the next, and doesn't it suggest that brain cells do not respond to a given programme but somehow make their own decisions?