Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, November 22, 2014, 13:33 (3654 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Yes, it [life] must return to some kind of balance if it is to go on. Pure tautology. The disappearance of 99% of species proves the point.
DAVID: Exactly. David Raup's book about lost species blames bad luck, loss of balance, not poor design of a life form. We must have the bush.-Who on earth mentioned poor design of a life form? For those forms that survive, the balance is right. For those forms that don't, the balance is wrong. Pure tautology.-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.
dhw: 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 [...] 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.
DAVID: Or enough information is implanted from the beginning in the IM so it can handle the adaptations.-If the Earth had got smashed to pieces by a comet before we arrived, no amount of information in the original IM would have produced humans.
 
DAVID: The issue of where the ‘information' in the codes came from, leads to a conscious source. By using the word ‘mechanism' you seem to avoid that consideration.
dhw: 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: And the mechanism contains the information to run it properly?-There is no point in a mechanism that doesn't have the information to run properly. That is what I would call the intelligence of the inventive mechanism, which processes information from outside and works out how to use it.-dhw: ...you can discuss evolution without discussing OOL. Darwin did it, and so can we.
DAVID: Darwin did it because he had to. He had no knowledge of inheritance. We currently have the background of research that allows us to consider a continuum of development from OOL to now. OOL had to contain a major portion of the information used today by the cells' genomes. OOL had a genome!-We are no nearer to discovering the origin of life than he was, so he was just as much at liberty to speculate as we are. In Origin of Species he chose not to do so. One can say God started it all and preprogrammed the very first cells to produce every single species and innovation and complex lifestyle, or he endowed the very first cells with an inventive mechanism that enabled their descendants autonomously to produce every single species etc. Same OOL, different theory of how evolution works. It's the latter that we are discussing.