EVOLUTION AND PURPOSE (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, November 26, 2015, 13:13 (3283 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: And it appears that Darwin's logic was faulty. Logically, if an innovation doesn't work straight away, there is no reason why it should survive. I would not expect advance planning at all. When organisms adapt I believe they respond to (not predict) environmental change, and the adjustments must be rapid or the organisms will not survive. For innovation, I suggest the same mechanism goes one step further, and USES the environmental change to its own advantage. Of course it will have to understand all the problems involved, and that requires intelligence...-DAVID: You should just stop here and recognize that it takes a sophisticated intelligence to foresee problems in a new body plan. Evolution jumps with new plans. No one just adds lumber to build a house. There is an overall plan first which tells the constructor just where everything is supposed to go.-How do you distinguish between intelligence and sophisticated intelligence? I am not comparing the intelligence of cells or ants with that of humans. The constructor needs to have plans before he builds his house, but when cell communities adapt to changed environments, they do so without advance planning (unless you think they predict the changes), and have to do so with great rapidity. Indeed, many of them fail - hence extinctions. I am suggesting that the same mechanism is at work for innovation, and I do not think the ant analogy is inapposite. “The amazing thing is that a very elegant solution to a colony-level problem arises from the individual interactions of a swarm of simple worker ants, each with only local information.” The bridge involves what you might call “sophisticated” engineering, with extraordinarily complex calculations. You call it “group instinctive intelligence”, and ask how it was developed. I'm happy with “instinctive” if it means aware but not self-aware. And if we acknowledge the possibility that cell communities are also endowed with such group intelligence, we have our analogy: the cell communities do not plan their innovations in advance. They work together, pooling their information to come up with their elegant solutions. We don't know how they do it because their form of intelligence is different from ours, and we don't know how it developed because we don't know how ANY form of intelligence developed.
 
DAVID: Ants planning a bridge mechanism in advance? Beyond ridiculous. And you are welcome.-Agreed. As above, ant intelligence, like cell intelligence, works out solutions on the spot, because if it didn't, the organism would die (adaptive solutions), or in my hypothesis the innovation wouldn't work (innovative solutions). You actually agree that there have to be such “jumps”, but because you cannot countenance the possibility of autonomous cellular intelligence, you argue that every single solution has already been preprogrammed into and passed on by the first living cells 3.8 billion years ago, or God personally intervened to provide the solutions - though his purpose was to create humans. But you don't like me to probe too deeply into the implications of this hypothesis. (See below.)-dhw: You now appear to be giving my hypothesis an equal chance of being correct. Thank you.
DAVID: Not a 50/50 chance, a smidgeon of one.-You wrote: “I have no idea if each or both are correct.” I'll settle for that!-dhw: How can the whole universe be fine tuned for life, but the zillions of solar systems that make up the rest of the universe are not fine tuned for life? Yes, we are here. And you say that's why God did it. So I ask why your God made zillions of solar systems not fine tuned for life, and why he made the duckbilled platypus and the other billions of species, lifestyles and wonders, 99% of which are extinct, when all he wanted was to make humans. That is not “how”; that is “why”. (You've told me how: preprogramming and/or dabbling.) And if you can't think why, then might it perhaps, maybe, possibly be because your reading of his purpose is...um...not quite right?-DAVID: Why do I have to cover every one of the possibilities to reach a conclusion? I've found enough reasons for me to reach my conclusions. You want an 100% answer to every observation and nuance. What is wrong with reasoning to the best solution, a standard philosophic technique.-But that is the whole point of discussion. We test one another's hypotheses. And I am trying with you to “reason to the best solution”. When I put alternatives to you, I think it is right and proper that you apply your standard philosophical technique of reasoning to look for loopholes. I am simply doing the same.