Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 23, 2014, 13:45 (3653 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
DAVID: Of course. What is your point?-You claimed that “if humans are programmed in from the beginning, the environmental changes don't matter.” I am pointing out to you that if your God did not control environmental changes, he left a surprising amount to chance. Enter the comet, exit the great plan. In other words, your belief that God's evolutionary purpose was to produce humans would require complete control of the environment.
 
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.
DAVID: 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.-We have only disagreed when you insisted initially that the cell does not have the equivalent of a brain (the inventive mechanism), and subsequently that all the necessary information for evolution from bacteria to humans was preplanted in the first cells, apart from what was needed for minor adaptations. If there is a black hole in our knowledge, let us not imagine that we know what we do not know.-dhw: We are no nearer to discovering the origin of life than he [Darwin] was, so he was just as much at liberty to speculate as we are. In Origin of Species he chose not to do so.
DAVID: 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.-That does not alter the fact that it is perfectly reasonable to discuss how evolution works without having to discuss the origin of life. See below.-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.
DAVID: Exactly. I'm coming to prefer a capable IM as the alternative to dabbling.-So leave Darwin and OOL out of it, and keep a nicely balanced, agnostically open mind about the range of an IM's capabilities. You know how important it is to stay balanced!