An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, October 05, 2014, 21:33 (3484 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.
DAVID: We don't know just how powerful God is. We presume it is very,very. It is therefore possible everything imaginable is pre-programmed. But perhaps not. That is why it is possible to imagine an evolutionary inventive mechanism that is sort of on its own. But if the DNA of life is viewed as a continuum, the inventive mechanism must be supplied with appropriate guidelines that are cognizant of the past construction to arrange for new speciation.-Of course the DNA of life has to be a continuum if you believe in evolution, and if an existing organism changes its structure or its patterns of behaviour, its inventive mechanism has to be cognizant of its present construction, of the new conditions that demand or allow for change, and also of its own constraints. But that does not mean preprogramming going back 3.7 billion years! “Sort of on its own” means (sort of) autonomous. So does “latitude in the instructions to allow for the very inventive bush of life”. “Latitude” = freedom of choice = autonomy. (The bush is not inventive anyway. It's your God or the organisms themselves that are inventive.) Then you go on to say “there is not absolutely tight pre-programming”. All of this amounts to autonomy, but the very idea that “inventive” = able to create new things and perform new actions that have not been preprogrammed (i.e. autonomous creativity) elicits the horrified cry from you of “NO WAY!” The schism in your thinking is also clear from your final comment as regards the cellAVID: Every process in the cell is like this. Each molecule acts as if it were individualy alive and thinking, just like workers in a factory. But they are simply following biochemical instructions-So where is the latitude, the sort of autonomy, the non-tight pre-programming? In other words, what issues the biochemical instructions if it's not the 3.7-billion-year programme? It would have to be the autonomous “brain” of the cell. You seem to be constantly dipping your toe in the water, and then pulling it out again, as if some nasty crocodawkins might come along and bite it off.
 
You offer an example of the problem on your often breathtaking thread of “Nature's Wonders”, for which I can only go on thanking youAVID: These little guys sneak into the ant colonies, have changed to be of a pretty look-alike body, and live the 'life of Riley'. Are the ants fooled or accepting?:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141002123635.htm-QUOTE: "But pulling off this way of life means undergoing drastic morphological changes."-So do you think your God preplanned these drastic morphological changes 3.7 billion years ago? Did he dabble personally in order to change the beetles' morphology? Or did some damn smart beetles autonomously work it out for themselves, and start up a whole new line of myrmecophilously Clever Clavigeritae? Is the latter hypothesis possible or not?-**********-Thank you for the very important Talbott essay. I will get back to it tomorrow.