DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, November 27, 2014, 12:32 (3647 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The terns follow coastlines. They might have figured it out and from habit patterns taught their DNA to pass it on to the chicks. But the plover had to discover the specks of Hawaii in the midst of the Pacific, and by your theory without preparation. -By my theory the plover, just like humans, felt the need for a change of scenery and went exploring. It didn't set out to discover Hawaii. Once it had found a suitable place to live, like the terns it passed the information on.
 
DAVID: I envision, which you can't seem to do, that the ability to migrate in general is a pattern, but the exact routes may have been worked in part by hunt and peck.-”The ability to migrate” is no more than the ability to move from one place to another. If there's winter or no food in X, the organism may look for summer or food elsewhere. The trigger, I would suggest, is not some special programme built into the first cells, but the need for survival, which in the animal kingdom means using legs or wings to find liveable conditions. -dhw: I am suggesting that the E.coli worked out its own digestive mechanisms as and when needed, instead of God preprogramming them 3.7 billion years ago. -DAVID: ...Wagner may be on to something in the protein search theory he has developed. It maybe that God incorporated such a search mechanism, but it had to contain information as to how to line up the molecules in order to carry out a function, since we know through Shapiro that organisms can modify their metabolism. Again, remember, all we know from DNA research at this juncture is how proteins are produced, what genes control what function, but we know nothing of how function is created. -We know nothing of how function is created, Shapiro says that organisms can modify their metabolism, Wagner thinks the genome is self-organizing, but Turell knows that God preprogrammed every innovation and complex lifestyle. Do you still insist that God preprogrammed the first cells with 40 different mechanisms to enable the E.coli to live happily ever after in your gut when you appeared 3.7 billion years later?-dhw: Please explain in concrete terms which part of its migration process is semi-autonomous. 
DAVID: I have no idea and neither do you how the plovers found it on their own, but my concept of the general pattern of migratory ability from the beginning allows for modifying routes later. Here's a way it could happen: God put a compass point into the plover.
 
For “general pattern of migratory ability” see above. You've forgotten that the plover didn't exist. Now apparently your God preprogrammed the first living cells not only to produce the plover and its mates, but also to give them all a compass.
 
DAVID: Once they found the islands, the establishment of instinct was easy. God does not do things the hard way.-Which do you think would be harder for God? To provide the first living cells with a few billion programmes for every innovation from bacteria to humans, via the plover and its compass, the monarch and its four generations, and the E.coli and its 40 digestive mechanisms, or to provide the first living cells with mechanisms to do their own inventing as and when required?