Natures wonders: social amoeba's immunity (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, March 04, 2016, 14:24 (3184 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Common descent may be logical but I cannot accept your cell communities doing logical planning for complex advances, which in a sense is solving problems in advance. - Yesterday, under “More Denton: A new book”, I wrote: “In my hypothesis, as you well know, cells have consciousness, which they may have been given by your God (see below). Advance planning is not part of my concept. My IM begins with an opportunity offered by the environment and responds by developing the innovation (much as an artist, writer, composer may begin with an idea and then develop it).” - In the context of adaptation and innovation, I do not believe organisms anticipate problems or opportunities. I see both processes as responses to current conditions. Understandably, you question whether cells/cell communities can have the intelligence to work out (relatively quickly) all the complexities involved in creating new organs, adapting old ones, devising new lifestyles, strategies etc. But there has to be an explanation for all of these, and in turn I question your idea that there is some unknown superintelligence which has preprogrammed them all in the very first cells, or has personally intervened to create them, just as I question the view that the whole process depends on endless strokes of luck. I understand your doubts over the first and the third of these hypotheses, and am only surprised that you do not seem to find anything questionable in your own. - Now do please explain to me how your preprogramming works with the amoeba. Are you telling us that your God preprogrammed the first cells to pass on instructions for thousands of amoeba to get together, for about 80% of them to become spores, about 20% to become the stalk, and 1% to maintain their phagocytic function?