Epigenetics: through phenotype changes? (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 16, 2015, 19:43 (3394 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: There are interesting developments here. I offered survival and improvement as purposes for life. You have now subtly changed my term “inventive mechanism” to “self-improvement mechanism”, and “autonomous” has now become “how strong”. I have no objections if those are the terms you want to use. But we shall remain miles apart if you still insist that your God programmed the very first cells with all the inventions or improvements (from weavers' nests and monarchs' lifestyles to eyes, ears and penises) that have taken place in the history of evolution, just for the sake of producing humans-DAVID: Terms are not important. It is concepts that fit the known evidence. I repeat, Gould termed humans as a 'glorious accident'. We are here against enormous odds. My only answer to 'why' is that I think it was planned. You think 'lucky'. That is fine with me. I can't think of any other possibility than those two. Lucky implies chance. So we are back to square one.-As always you scurry back to chance v. design and gloss over the issue of the inventive mechanism, which is the point of this particular post on this particular thread. (It begins with the researchers' claim that organisms might have a degree of control over their evolution.) My fault for bringing in your anthropocentrism, which I'll tackle on the “Animal Language” thread. You seem to have accepted the idea of an inventive/self-improvement mechanism, but on the other hand we have the problem of the weaverbird, the monarch, the plover and billions of innovations and complex lifestyles. My point here, to put it as succinctly as possible, is that an inventive/self-improvement mechanism which doesn't invent/self-improve is not an inventive/self-improvement mechanism. So, to take just one example in conjunction with my post under “Animal Language”, do you still categorically exclude the possibility that the first generation(s) of weaverbirds designed their own nests?