Epigenetics: Passing the effects (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 19:32 (3372 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Simply, the nest is too complex for the weaverbirds to have designed it. But they could have been helped in the design development, a cooperative effort, much like a parent teaching a child how to dress. View it like coaching cricket. Coach demonstrates, player learns and improves.-DHW: So God took time off from preparing the way for humans in order to coach the weaverbird, monarch, salmon, spider? That's the only way the process could have been cooperative. Of course my alternative is that the birds themselves cooperated in pooling their (God-given?) intelligence to develop the design. No need for God to get involved at all.-David: First you proposed committee meetings of single cells, now birds. Don't you think God chaired the meetings?-So you're saying that committee meetings are possible, but only if God chaired them. Are you suggesting, then, that at different times God summoned all the weaverbirds, monarchs, salmon, plovers, spiders etc. to give them a demonstration? “Committee meetings” was of course your term, in an attempt to ridicule the concept of cooperation by anthropomorphizing it. We KNOW that cells cooperate, that even different species cooperate, and that social organisms like ants cooperate, all of them producing something new (there must have been a first ants' nest, though it may well have become more complex through the work of subsequent generations). Many species of weaverbird are actually social - apparently African sparrow weavers build apartment houses! If only you could rid yourself of the prejudice that humans alone are possessed of any autonomous inventive intelligence (a prejudice that persists despite the many articles you have posted, demonstrating the reasoning powers of other species) you would see that there is no need for a 3.7-billion-year computer programme to cover every single innovation and lifestyle, or for your God to give personal demonstrations to all his creatures to show them how to build nests and webs and honeycombs and dams, and live wacky lifestyles.