DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, November 28, 2014, 15:21 (3646 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: [The plover] 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: 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.-My answer was to your question how the plover knew about Hawaii (i.e. it didn't). As for the muscle power, what are you suggesting? That God preprogrammed training courses for plovers in Alaska? Nobody knows the answer, and we can pick holes in any hypothesis. Why would your God specially preprogramme the first cells with plover muscles and compass when according to you all he really wanted to do was create humans? 
 
dhw: ”The ability to migrate” is no more than the ability to move from one place to another. [...] The trigger, I would suggest, is not some special programme built into the first cells, but the need for survival. 
DAVID: You are ignoring that both the monarch and salmon go back to the same spot each migration. Not programmed, huh? -I'm suggesting that once a successful solution to a problem has been found, organisms stick to it. I'm sceptical that the first living cells contained route maps to be passed down through billions of years to plovers, monarchs and salmon. -DAVID: ... how do you explain the magnetic compasses in so many types of animals? Luck?-How do we explain any organ, innovation, faculty, lifestyle? Every day you see such examples of macro-organisms with abilities or forms of “intelligence” different from our own. And yet you reject the possibility that the communities of micro-organisms which comprise them and us might also have forms of “intelligence” different from our own that have enabled them to cooperate in creating these abilities. (The hypothesis leaves open the possibility that the inventive mechanism was itself designed by your God.)
 
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?
DAVID: 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.-Good. We now have the inventive mechanism not only changing the metabolism but also cooperating with other inventive mechanisms to improve the chances of survival. Evolution through the cooperation of different “intelligences”.
 
DAVID: 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 [etc.]... I don't see how your fanciful IM's can do it without guidance.-I don't think your God's inventive ability is as weak as you seem to suppose. If the human brain can unravel these formulae, what makes you think your God is incapable of inventing other mechanisms that can find the necessary formulae when required?