Clever Corvids: using tools (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 04, 2015, 21:58 (3156 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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. -I bow before your more perfect use of English. I simply meant a continuous process.-> 
> dhw: Back you go to your meaningless “semi-autonomous”. Either he preprogrammed the innovations or he didn't. -Semi-autonomous is 'largely self-governing' in my Webster's Collegiate dictionary, which fits my theistic evolution concepts. Organisms have much innovative freedom as long as they fit God's desires. 
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> 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:
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> 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)
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> David's comment: These are thinking cells just like Shapiro describes. All the information to act is built in.
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> dhw: 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".-I don't see how you can draw such conclusions about the inflammatory cells. Of course they are acting on built-in instructions. I once had to give a second year lecture on the inflammatory reaction to my Med school class. If I had to present your concept of what I presented in the above article I would have been laughed out of the class.-Once again: a person develops a small cut which bleeds and has some foreign material in it. Wounded skin sends out chemical signals for help. Blood vessels dilate and deliver extra edema fluid. Various white cells arrive and congregate at the scene. White cells equals pus. There are several types of white cells which are called for by need for the different types of infectious process. Platelets are called to stop the bleeding and initiate the clotting process which is a cascade of around 20 chemical reactions with feed back controls for the correct amounts of each step. And fibroblasts arrive to start the scarring process. All of this is automatic, controlled, stepwise, and none of the cells are thinking. Chemicals and hormones are acting spontaneously from the trauma. The cells and platelets I am describing above are all independently floating around in the blood stream and react to the chemical signals. I view this as equivalent to bacteria, and you must realize by now, I will not change my concept of how all this works. We come from bacteria by evolution, and cell processes were set way back then, and simply modified for multicellularity by specialization. That is evolutionary continuity.