Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 22, 2014, 22:33 (3653 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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.-I've explained in the other thread my differing view of the value of balance.
]
> 
> dhw: 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.-Of course. What is your point?-> dhw: 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.-Now we are agreeing. Intelligent information is present in the master DNA code and I'm sure in the IM. It produces phenotype and function, although all we know so far is how proteins are produced, not how the body appears or the organs begin to function. That is still a very black hole in our knowledge. we have very little to theorize with.-> 
> dhw: 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.-Because he had nothing to say about it except conjure up a warm little pond. We know little more at this juncture, but we are learning much about genetic mechanisms that started with the first cell.-> dhw: 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.-Exactly. I'm coming to prefer a capable IM as the alternative to dabbling.