An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, October 04, 2014, 15:48 (3701 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Saturday, October 04, 2014, 16:04

dhw: Do you or don't you now accept the possibility that speciation may be the product of an autonomous inventive mechanism (possibly created by your God) which takes its own unpreprogrammed decisions?
DAVID: No. As stated above I can only envision a guided inventive program, and think the guidance is writen into the inventive program, since it must take into account the many possible environmental and preditory challenges that may well be unexpected. Life is not only dealing with its own evolution and the evolution of rival animals, but also dealing an evolving uiniverse and Earth.-Thank you for this clear answer. The problems you have listed show why it is so difficult to believe in your evolutionary scenario. Your God's programme, implanted in the very first living organisms and consisting of billions of innovations and “Nature's Wonders” to be passed down over billions of years, had to take into account every single environmental change, not to mention the possibility that it could be wiped out by an oops-that-was-“unexpected” global catastrophe. (I'd have thought predators would be part of the 3.7-billion-year-old programme, but whaddo I know?) If you believe God's programme had a purpose, why would he leave ANYTHING to chance, since he presumably has the power to control the conditions you believe he created in the first place? But that means preprogramming the challenges as well as the responses.
 
Perhaps for this reason you are also unsure to what extent your God may have dabbled, but dabbling would surely imply that either his programme wasn't working, or he was making it all up as he went along. And dabbling smacks of creationism rather than evolution. I have no problem accepting your reservations about my own hypothesis regarding an autonomous inventive mechanism, but perhaps you will understand why I am seeking an alternative (even a theistic one) to what you are offering.
 
dhw: Either the genome has an autonomous mechanism or it doesn't. You have consistently defined “inventive” in terms of obeying God's instructions, instead of “creating new things and performing new actions without being preprogrammed”
DAVID: I've answered above. I don't think it is possible to create a new species without intergrating the past programming of life with the new experiences the genome finds or is told.-Apart perhaps from the word “programming” I agree. Evolution is based on the theory that new species arise out of existing organisms. It seems likely that they change when they are confronted with new experiences. Your explanation of such changes is that every single one is preprogrammed, which implies that every single new experience is also preprogrammed, as above. -******** -dhw:(I'll watch the video tomorrow. Thank you for posting it)
DAVID: Just trying to show yhou that the cells are primarily automated factories. But not is the brain wwith the plasticity found.-I like the word “primarily”. We too are primarily automated factories. Some materialists would argue that we are nothing but automated factories. But you believe there is something else. Perhaps that something else “emerges” from the interaction between our cells, and in particular our brain cells. Perhaps something else also “emerges” from the interaction between cells of other organisms, and in particular between their brain cells or between mechanisms of what may be the equivalent of the brain. Perhaps.
 
The significance of the video for me is not the automation. The vocabulary leaves me numb, but the complexity confirms just how difficult it is to put one's faith in chance.