Bacterial motors carefully studied (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 14:47 (3147 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I do reject chance, and I accept purpose and design, but that is the whole point of my hypothesis: that instead of design being “guided” by God, it is carried out by autonomous, intelligent cell communities (perhaps invented by God), and the purpose is self-improvement, not the production and feeding of humans.... I agree that only minds could do it, and so the question is: do cells have minds? Not human minds, but cell minds that are sentient, cognitive, communicative, cooperative, and capable of taking decisions. You say no, and others say yes. Even the yes, however, does not guarantee that those cell minds are capable of such complex innovations. I have never denied the problem of complexity. (New bold)
DAVID: I don't think that you have any notion of the complexity of living organic chemistry.-You need to be an organic chemist to understand the complexity of organic chemistry. I'm not a physicist, cosmologist, botanist, chemist, or quantum theorist either. So what are you saying? Does every organic chemist, physicist etc. tell us that God “guided” (i.e. preprogrammed or personally directed) every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution, all in order to produce and/or feed humans? And does my not being an organic chemist invalidate my acknowledgement, repeated ad nauseam, of the complexity of the cell and the process that leads to innovation?
 
DAVID: If I can cajole you, please watch the first 15 or so minutes of this lecture by a Rice U. professor who makes synthetic organic molecules as is profession, in a discussion of origin of life. But what he describers goes on every day in the living body after life starts:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/origin-of-life/james-tour-on-the-hypocrisy-of-origin-of-...
I apologize that he is a terrible lecturer, but the point he makes about the intricacies of protein production in living tissues is right on. Your cell committees have no chance of ever making a major modification of form, style or structure in speciation. My large organism chauvinism is valid!-I waited in vain for him to shout at me that God “guided” every molecule throughout every step of evolution, from bacteria to humans, or even that cells are automatons - though I admit that I switched him off after half an hour of his ranting. However, we are informed by the blurb that “most scientists do not understand how evolution could explain the existence of life”, and the heading tells us that this is an attack on origin of life hypocrisy. Yet again: Evolution is not a theory designed to explain the origin of life. “There's no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution.” Correct. How often do we have to repeat this? That is why we have different theories. Under "Immunity" you wrote: “As Prof. Tour points out, the complexity of evolutionary advancement is mind-boggling, but perhaps not for a certain mind.” I too regard the complexity of evolutionary advancement as mind-boggling, and I don't know how it happened. Nor does he and nor do you. And if we ever do find out how, the answer may be as mind-boggling as your hypothesis or mine.