DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, November 28, 2014, 00:07 (3647 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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.-You make a good travel agent. How did you supply the muscle power for the plover to fly over 3,000 miles over an uncharted ocean to have the plover find paradise? yours is a good non-answer.-> 
> dhw: ”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. -You are ignoring that both the monarch and salmon go back to the same spot each migration. Not programmed, huh? -> dhw: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?-No, I think the E. coli was given basic genetic patterns in the beginning of its life and did some modest alterations of metabolism on its own. It also got some brotherly bacterial horizontal transfers to help out. God arranged for that transfer mechanism, remember? Horizontal transfers are part of the overall basic patterns.-> 
> dhw: 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.-So how do you explain the magnetic compasses in so many types of animals? Luck?-> 
> dhw: 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,....or to provide the first living cells with mechanisms to do their own inventing as and when required?-I don't think God's programming ability is as weak as you seem to suppose. What is a major issue for your inventive proposals is the issue of 'search space' when looking for functional proteins to line up a sequence of cooperating molecules to create a new function or a new phenotype. A 100 amino acid protein (really a very small protein)has 10^700 shapes. Most enzymes which are necessary for every reaction are 1,200 amino acids or larger. I don't see how your fanciful IM's can do it without guidance.