More Denton: Reply to Tony (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, August 13, 2015, 19:46 (3390 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: I think the environment adds fairly significant constraints that dramatically reduces the number of programs required, because all un-programmed for behaviors and un-programmed for environmental scenarios end in death. When we look at nature, this is in fact what we see. Fish out of water dies. Fish too deep dies [...]-Dhw: You seem to be suggesting that all survivors have been preprogrammed, whereas all non-survivors have not. -TONY: Not at all. I am saying that survivors were the ones that stayed within their pre-defined limits, whereas non-survivors were exposed to environments that exceeded their limits, and thus were unable to adapt.-Thank you. Perhaps, then, “unprogrammed-for” was misleading. The above certainly leaves ample room for the hypothesis of autonomous cellular intelligence, which would vary immensely between different organisms. Those whose intelligence - whether incorporated in the first cells (common descent) or in the prototypes (separate creation) - was too limited to find ways of coping with environmental change would naturally perish. I trust then that you remain open-minded, since we “don't understand the process or the mechanism so a definitive statement is premature” - a beautifully balanced approach which, as I noted earlier, can be applied to so many other fields besides our evolutionary/non-evolutionary hypotheses!