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

by David Turell , Sunday, July 19, 2015, 15:42 (3415 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: This is still not an argument against common descent. -Please remember I have accepted common descent. On that basis, the only way I can accept it is with guidance. The gaps require exquisite planning because they are so large, involving many complex interlocking changes, which I keep showing in references to the Cambrian. Darwin feared the Cambrian. He had every right to be so afraid.
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> dhw: In the post on the immune system you have, with customary honesty - and I cannot praise you too highly for this - offered evidence both against your “short time” argument and in favour of cellular intentionality:
 
> DAVID: Within germinal centers, B cells evolve in a Darwinian-like fashion. The gene responsible for producing their antibodies mutates rapidly, a million times faster than the normal rate of mutation in the human body, and the cells proliferate-> Comment: This is the only example I know of that fits dhw's 'inventive mechanism' where cells can mutate at will for a specified purpose.
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> dhw: Thank you.-From your point of view, I wouldn't thank me. These highly specified cells have an enormous degree of information in their DNA, which had to come from their original DNA in the initial one-celled zygote, then modified in translation as the embryo developed. There is a chicken and egg problem in viewing this from the standpoint of Darwin-style chance evolution. How did organisms protect themselves from lethal infections before the immune process was fully developed? Do you want to propose that lethal organisms and immune mechanisms developed at an equal pace, hand in hand through chance? I don't.
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> DAVID: Remember Lenski's work on E. coli, millions upon millions of generations and almost no changes. It takes several generations to fix a trait in humans, and that is the small stuff.
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> dhw: We know that bacteria have survived without change. They can hardly count as a precedent by which we can judge what time was needed by an autonomous inventive mechanism to produce humans.- You seem unaware that in Lenski's work he challenged the bacteria and got minor changes. His point was to study mutation as a process.
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> dhw: I can certainly accept it. Once the mechanism for life and evolution came into existence (how it did so is the mystery), the guidance may have come from organisms looking for ways both to survive and to improve themselves.-You keep using strange images: 'organisms looking for ways to survive'?
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> dhw: But does he [Denton] mention God preprogramming the first cells or dabbling?-No, that is our discussion. He inferentially accepts that God had to do it.
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> DAVID: That is why Einstein didn't want to give up an eternal universe, but your objection to the Big Bang, is that it must have come from an eternal something. I agree and it appears that this universe had a beginning. From there our reasoning diverges. There is a God.
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> dhw: I am delighted to be bracketed with Einstein! As regards a beginning, appearances can deceive. But our reasoning only diverges fifty per cent: maybe there is a God, and maybe there isn't.-Your usual wishy-washy 'maybe' on the picket fence.