Evolution v Creationism: guided evolution? dhw? (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, April 16, 2015, 20:08 (3507 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: We have reached a dead end, as you have made it clear that even a God-designed autonomous inventive mechanism is out of the question for you. However, you have acknowledged in the past that no-one can tell the difference between automatic responses and autonomous, intelligent responses. So long as there are scientists who argue in favour of sentient, cognitive, decision-making cells/cell communities, and no satisfactory solution has been found to the mystery of innovation, my hypothesis has to remain a possibility.-DAVID: It still depends upon the word sentient, which can mean an automatic response to stimuli. -I gave you three adjectives, and you selected one. “Sentient” is the least problematical. Of course cells/cell communities are sentient - you cannot respond to the environment if you can't sense it in some way, and for the most part I would say this IS automatic. It's the use that is made of perceptions that brings cognition and decision-making into play.-DAVID: As tis article shows multicellular cells can communicate just like bacteria in quorum sensing. Why not? Cells that are 'uni' learned first and when they joined logically they carried the same abilities to the 'multi' state:-Yes, indeed, and these abilities may include autonomous cognition and decision-making.-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hair-regrowth-discovery-suggests-skin-cells-c...-QUOTE: "Bacteria chatter among themselves. A chemical signaling system called quorum sensing allows those single-celled bugs to detect when their numbers have multiplied enough to mount an effective attack or emit glowing light. Yet decades after scientists learned about this brainless bacterial coordination a research team has uncovered new evidence suggesting animal cells may speak the same lingo."-DAVID: All by chemical reactions, under the control of DNA instructions.-Our own responses and decisions also involve chemical reactions. The question is what controls them, and “DNA instructions” does not answer the question. “Brainless” is fair enough, but we simply do not know if cells/cell communities have the EQUIVALENT of a brain, i.e. a control centre that coordinates the responses and the decision-making. Your dog has a degree of cognitive ability, though it is far smaller than your own. Nevertheless, it is capable of certain responses that are beyond you, because for example it has a vastly superior sense of smell and hearing. No-one is claiming that cells have human-type intelligence, but you know from Nature's Wonders and from your own body that cell communities can cooperate to accomplish astonishing feats even without your great intellect. In fact, we don't actually know the extent to which our human intelligence is autonomous. If we did, there would be no debate about free will. My point is that all forms of life have their own special kind of intelligence, and since we know that cells/cell communities can do their own adapting, we cannot - as you do - exclude the possibility that they can also do their own inventing.