Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, November 21, 2014, 20:09 (3654 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Friday, November 21, 2014, 20:18

dhw; Our whole discussion centres on just how much autonomy the inventive mechanism might have.
DAVID: Exactly, and no one at this juncture knows.-That's what I like to hear - instead of authoritative statements that it's only capable of minor adaptations. 
It sounds as if Spetner has added nothing to our own ruminations, but once again thank you for keeping us informed.
 
DAVID: Life stays in balance. 
dhw: No it doesn't. It constantly shifts its balance - hence extinctions, innovations, dominance, decline...
DAVID: Have it your way. It always returns to balance. Why is everyone trying to protect species at risk? 99% of all the past are gone now. Life's balance constantly changes but must return to balance each time.-Yes, it must return to some kind of balance if it is to go on. What is the point of the argument? That different forms of life require different conditions, and if the conditions are right for some forms we can say life is balanced for them, and if conditions are not right for some forms, we can say life is not balanced for them. Pure tautology. The disappearance of 99% of species proves the point.-dhw: Eventually, past changes somehow led to humans, but if changing environmental conditions were not planned, God's supposed plan to produce humans depended on luck.
DAVID: Good point. You are channeling Gould. But you forget if, humans are programmed in from the beginning, the environmental changes don't matter.-Sorry, but there would be no point in planning humans if the environment never produced the right atmosphere, or if the Earth got smashed to pieces by a comet. Imagine planning fish and then leaving it to Lady Luck to conjure up the water. I find it interesting that you believe your God can manipulate matter in such a way that the universe is fine tuned to support life on Earth, and yet you think he left that life at the mercy of chance. Well, if he could leave the environment to luck, to see what might happen, maybe he left the inventive mechanism to its own devices as well.
 
dhw: I keep repeating that the beginning of life must have included not only the mechanisms (or the information to make the mechanisms work, since you don't like “mechanisms”) not only for life itself, but also for reproduction and for evolution. I do not recall ever minimizing the complexity of the earliest forms of life.
DAVID: You are not minimizing. The issue of where the 'information' in the codes came from, leads to considering a conscious source. By using the word 'mechanism' you seem to avoid that consideration.-How can I possibly be avoiding that consideration when time and again I have conceded for argument's sake that the mechanism may have been created by your God?-DAVID: Origin and evolution are two items that are unfortunately intimately tied together. OOL brought the code that created evolution. "You can't have one without the other". Remember the song "Love and Marriage".-I do remember the song. “Both go together like a horse and carriage.” But of course you can have love without marriage, and all too often there is marriage without love (you and I have been very lucky). And you can discuss evolution without discussing OOL. Darwin did it, and so can we.