An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 02, 2014, 19:23 (3703 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Thursday, October 02, 2014, 19:34


> dhw: Once again you are shifting the focus of this discussion from how evolution might work to the origin of life and of whatever mechanisms have led to evolution. Your answer is that God did it, but you don't know how, and then you expect me to tell you how it was done! I don't know.-And, of course, neither do I. But in discussiong evolution it is not possible to exclude from such discussion the start of life, since DNA is implanted with the startup information which is then continuously used as experience and new information is added. It is all one continuum. My first problem is not accepting the idea that any form of chance could create reliably functional information in DNA codes. Fully functional first life had to run on those codes. -> dhw: I can only consider different possibilities: some sort of god; some sort of panpsychist process ; chance, which I cannot leave out. For various reasons, I find NONE of these convincing, and so just like you, “I am stuck with no answer”. I do, however, believe that “speciation is done by absorbing new information from the environment and collating it with existing information...” A good summing up of the evolutionary process that followed on after life had started. And that is the point at which this discussion begins.- No, the discussion must begin with the start of life. It is a continuum from the first fuctional life to now, using the first coded information of the first fully functional life and adding to that information as life is experienced and as it became more complex. Old information collated with new information from experience as it is developed.
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> dhw: Do you think your God is incapable of designing an autonomously inventive mechanism (even though you believe he has done so with the human brain)? Please answer.-The human brain can continuously transform its functional abilities simply from the experience of it being used in different ways. That is an magnificent example of autonomous inventiveness. So we have an example of an existing organ that can do it. As a result I strongly feel that God might have implanted a mechanism for speciation in the genome, as I have mentioned before.
 
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> By design, I mean the deliberate creation of an object as opposed to its having come about by chance. In this case, God may have created the mechanism, and the mechanism may have created the innovations that led to speciation. I think we might find such a mechanism in the genome.
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> DAVID: Dawkins says life appears designed, but is not. I say it is designed. Your position, please!
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> dhw: Once again the subject of this thread is how evolution proceeds and not how life began.-As noted above, I look at life as an unbroken continuum from first life to now. All of it looks actually designed to me.-> dhw: However, after nearly seven years of discussion, I'd have thought you would have known by now that my position is on the picket fence.-I know I put you on that fence in the past. Still not painful?-> dhw: I agree that life appears designed, and so I refuse to say it is not. But just as I have problems believing in chance, I have problems believing in any kind of designer,...and so I cannot go beyond the statement that life appears designed. That is why I am an agnostic. Now please tell me why your comprehensive 3.7-billion-year computer programme bothers you, and what evolutionary alternative you can think of.-I'm bothered only by not seeing a clear way to guess the correct possibility: (1) 3.7- billion-year coded program, (2) stepping in to dabble, or (3) an offshoot of the 3.7-b-y program, an inventive speciation code which steps in as needed. Accepting God-driven evolution requires one of these to be correct. It is posible for me to imagine that all three are possible at different junctures in the evolutionary process to reach humans. And I think that there may not be further evolution than where we are right now.