Clever Corvids: using tools (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 04, 2015, 19:03 (3368 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You keep referring to an established community in which cells must stick to their assigned role or there will be disruption (here, disease). I have focused on bacterial intelligence in order to find an explanation for the INNOVATIONS that drive evolution. The cells of the kidney community won't invent something new.-DAVID: It appears you have missed the point I am making. I am comparing single kidney cells (there are several types), which can do prodigious very complex functions all automatically, with the tasks of single cell bacteria, to point out that bacterial life can easily proceed automatically. And kidney cells do it with no evidence of thought. The fact that bacteria seem to react thoughtfully to stimuli in no way suggests they can thoughtfully plan an innovation.-I had drafted a reply to this, to the effect that I've no idea how much “thinking” kidney cells might do as members playing a specific role in an established community, unlike bacteria which fend for themselves and solve all kinds of problems as they cope with all kinds of environments. However, your latest post concerning injury cells is a revealing one, so see further down. -dhw: But we have agreed that evolution is not a continuum. There are jumps, because innovations break the continuum.
DAVID: A continuum can have jumps. You are back to touting itty-bitty Darwin steps.-A continuum can't have jumps! “Continuum: a scale of related things on which each one is only slightly different from the one before” - Longman Dic. of Contemporary English. That perfectly describes the continuum advocated by Darwin, who said that nature did not jump: “Natura non facit saltum” (Difficulties on Theory).-dhw: However, perhaps it is vital for you to believe that cells/cell communities are automatons, because that would mean they couldn't change themselves, and so only God could change them. Might it be, then, that you are so firmly opposed to Shapiro and Co because cellular intelligence (even if it was created by your God) would put paid to your particular theory of divinely planned and preprogrammed anthropocentric evolution?
DAVID: Of course God is a component of my thought. And of course, if God put semi-autonomous inventive intelligence into single cells, I'm fine with that.-Back you go to your meaningless “semi-autonomous”. Either he preprogrammed the innovations or he didn't. And either he dabbled (which includes separate creation)or he didn't. If he didn't preprogramme or dabble the innovations, and allowing for the fact that organisms are restricted by their own limitations and those of the environment, you are left with random mutations or cellular autonomy. 
 
Xxxxx-DAVID: Another example of automatic action by human single cells. In infection or inflammation from injury cells called neutrophils arrive and guide the action to kill the infective agent or repair the wound:-http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43917/title/Neutrophils-Lead--T-C...
 
QUOTE: "For Kim, the phenomenon he and his colleagues have uncovered highlights the extent of collective behavior and shared information from animal species to the level of the cell. This is individual cells sharing their experience and information to perform a team function,” he said." (David's bold)-David's comment: These are thinking cells just like Shapiro describes. All the information to act is built in.-You begin by calling it “automatic action”, and you end by saying the "information to act" is built in. The article does not mention automatism - though it describes the mechanics of cellular communication - and it does not mention built-in "information to act". On the contrary, it stresses that such collective behaviour and shared information are common to animal species and individual cells. You acknowledge this cooperative behaviour in animals as being intelligent, but you refuse to accept it in cells. Now these experts are telling you it's the same. The intelligence may be built in (and may have been put there by your God), but the information is passed around, processed and acted upon through cells communicating and cooperating, just like animals. Yes, indeed, these are also the thinking cells Shapiro describes as cognitive, sentient, decision-making beings.