More about how evolution works (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 14, 2015, 12:15 (3326 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: This looks like a learned behaviour that became an instinct. Family planning with food source.
dhw: The premise would be that fruit flies are not machines but thinking beings, and they use whatever materials are at their disposal to investigate ways in which they can best cope with the environment. Whatever works stays (natural selection).-DAVID: Good definition of natural selection. Remember that fruit flies now do this behaviour automatically as an instinct. I can't tell with certainty how it came about. The first male to do it might have said: "great, I can eat, and might as well get a sex partner to enjoy the feast with me". Others followed and it became instinct.-Nobody knows how these things came about (let alone “with certainty”), but your scenario seems perfectly feasible, if one could translate the words back into Fruitflyese. Whatever the innovation, lifestyle or wonder, there must have been a first, and the organism(s) that started it must have known what they were doing. We humans also perform lots of actions by instinct, but you will know from your experience as a physician that when something goes wrong, we have to learn all over again how to do them. The instinctive becomes conscious. We'd need to set our fruit flies some problems before we could tell how “intelligent” they were.
 
dhw: ...adaptation may hold the key to innovation. If we are sceptical of the notion that God preplanned... we are left with the hypothesis that the cell communities within the guppy make all the necessary adjustments. They are confronted with a new problem, they process the information that comes to them from outside, and they communicate and cooperate with one another in working out how to deal with it. These are manifestations of intelligence. And once you attribute intelligence to organisms, you open up the possibility that as well as adapting, they may also be capable of innovating.-DAVID: All we know is that their genome is capable of methylating at appropriate spots, using intelligent information in their genome. The rest is inference, and we don't even know how the methylation process originally appeared in evolution. We can recognize the code contains information, and my choice for source is God.-You love the term “intelligent information”, but in the past when we have tried to pin it down, it simply amounts to the mechanism which enables organisms to process information from outside themselves and act accordingly. We don't know how ANYTHING originally appeared in evolution. No matter how much you cloak your ideas in fancy language, you are faced with a choice: either organisms are preprogrammed by your God to adapt/innovate, he intervenes personally, or there is a mechanism (possibly designed by your God) that enables organisms to do their own independent adapting and innovating.