More Denton: Last essay of a 3 part series (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 15, 2015, 15:33 (3419 days ago) @ dhw


> Dhw: Yet again, thank you for a fascinating essay and for providing us with relevant extracts. I am adding a few quotes (marked EXTRA), with a view to possible discussion.
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> EXTRA: “If not small-scale changes, then what? “[G]enetic mechanisms,” Vincent Lynch has argued, “that are distinct from those involved in the modification of existing characters.”
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> dhw: Darwin proposed random mutations which would provide advantages in any milieu, and his gradualism required bridging groups. On both counts, you and I are sceptical. Your proposal is God's preplanning and/or dabbling, and my alternative is an autonomous inventive mechanism (possibly designed by your God) within cell communities, which cooperate to make all the adjustments necessary for the innovation. There is no bridging group, randomness, or even selection pressure (as the goal is improvement rather than survival). Cellular intelligence does it all.-The problem with your comment is evolution is clearly seen to progress with great jumps and starts, and this not explained in Darwin theory at all. Finally, your 'cellular intelligence' must be extremely bright to make those jumps, and since this 'intelligence' must contain basic information to work with as it makes decisions, where did the information come from? How do cells decided what to invent, or is it scattershot and may the best form win?
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> dhw: EXTRA: “More than a century ago, Alfred Russel Wallace noted correctly that brain size is today more or less uniform across the human species. Assuming that brain size is a marker of intellectual ability, Wallace reasoned that prehistoric man did not use his brain to its capacity.
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> "Ancient African hunters were equipped with all the basic linguistic and cognitive potential that modern human beings share. These they never used. 
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> dhw: This is like saying evolution should have happened in a day! The first cell was also “an instrument beyond the needs of its possessor”, since bacteria did not need to evolve. Every innovation has therefore led to organs and organisms of a kind and degree far beyond what was “required”. -And this is the point I have continuously made. this brain arrived with lots more capacity than used, and indicates my point of pre-planning. Another example of the giant leaps in evolution not under selection pressure.-> dhw: Just as the first cells must have contained the mechanism for evolution (i.e. some kind of “brain”), so too did the early human brain contain the mechanism for reproducing, inventing, sharing, and complexifying ideas. The mystery for me is the source of the mechanism, not the evolution of its products (which include language).-Of course the first cells contained a mechanism for evolution. it is called information implanted in the genome. It is your mystery, not mine.
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> dhw: EXTRA: 
> "Against every Darwinian expectation, there is now a “growing appreciation of the oft-dismissed possibility of evolution of new genes from scratch…” As genomic comparisons become ever more sophisticated, it is increasingly apparent that evolution from scratch may have been the route to new genes throughout the history of life.” 
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> If we believe in common descent, every innovation must have taken place within existing organisms. “Evolution from scratch” suggests separate creation, but once again, the internal factor governing innovation could be an inventive mechanism or “brain” contained within the cell/cell community.-The part you have not quoted is the point in the essay about ORFan genes, ones that pop up out of nowhere to help produce the giant leaps in evolution. This is a discontinuity in genomic evolution, and very anti-Darwin.
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> EXTRA: "One of the most curious aspects of the almost universal acknowledgement that the cosmos is fine-tuned for life is the failure to take the next logical step and infer that nature is fine-tuned, as well, for the origin and evolution of life. This failure is one of the most striking in recent scientific history, an episode made all the more extraordinary when it is also widely conceded that the origin of life remains utterly enigmatic.”
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> Another great paragraph. Of course it is a powerful argument for theism. The counter argument, as I see it, would be the addition of “as we know it”, applied both to the cosmos and to life. We have no idea if a different cosmos would have resulted in different forms of life or no life at all, and this brings us back to the wretched “anthropic principle”, which can be used equally to support theism and atheism. Obviously if x and y were not x and y, there would be no x and y, but does that mean there would be nothing at all? The whole problem “remains utterly enigmatic”.-We only know carbon-based life. The anthropic principle is circular garbage which, I disagree, does not support theism. And if there is a different possible cosmos with a different life, it would be just as miraculous.