EVOLUTION AND PURPOSE (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, November 27, 2015, 12:35 (3282 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ...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.-DAVID: Your cell communities are now stated as fact? Extinctions are not instantaneous, but take millions of years. There is time for adaptation if possible.
-I would describe every organ as a community of cooperating cells, and every organism as a community of cooperating cell communities. This would apply whether the cooperating cells were intelligent (me) or automatons (you). What is your objection?-Thank you for the correction re extinctions. Very badly argued by me! Of course it all depends on the nature of the environmental change. If the threat is accumulative, as with increasing shortage of food or human encroachment, the process of extinction or adaptation will be gradual. Innovations are jumps, and I should have confined my parallel process to when organisms do need to adapt quickly, for instance in polluted waters. I'm pretty sure you gave us an example yourself. Anyway, I've googled, and here are two more examples, the second of which relates to crustaceans in Lake Constance - a region where I lived for many years!
 
CHS APES Blog: Trout Adapt to Pollution - blogspot.com-1.	how do animals adapt to water pollution? | GreenAnswers
greenanswers.com/question/how-do-animals-adapt-water-pollution-(I can never get the hang of establishing these links directly. Sorry!)-Once again, my point is that the adaptive mechanism does not plan in advance but responds to the environment, and I am suggesting that the same mechanism may be responsible for innovation: no planning involved, but responding inventively as opposed to adaptively. You clearly agree that this is what happens, but you insist that it had to be preprogrammed or personally organized by your God.-dhw: 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.-DAVID: Fair enough. I will continue to poke loopholes into your invented cell community committee intelligence.-And the loopholes are very real. Nobody has an explanation for evolutionary innovation, but we do not have evidence that cell communities possess the intelligence necessary to produce it. You are absolutely right. At the same time, we do not have evidence that 3.8 billion years ago your God planted a computer programme in the first cells to cover every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution, or that he intervened personally to create them, or that he created them all (extinct and extant) for the purpose of producing humans. Am I right, or am I right?