Biological complexity: Feedback loop importance (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, April 25, 2016, 12:25 (3135 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I read the essay and made my own list of quotes, which I then found was more or less the same as yours. There is no need to repeat them. The gist of the whole article (correct me if necessary) is that cell communities throughout Nature organize themselves to cope with the demands of the environment. The feedback loop simply tells us how they interact. Strikingly, the essay only talks about adaptation, and never about innovation, which is the great mystery underlying evolution, but in both processes there obviously has to be a physical mechanism whereby cells can make changes to themselves. Over and over again, we see the expression “self-organize” which takes place through communication between the cells. Advance planning is not possible, because organisms cannot predict environmental change. And that is as far as the essay can take us. It does not tell us that “Shapiro is wrong”, or that your theory concerning God's “guidance” is wrong. It only tells us that cell communities “self-organize” (without advance planning) to enable themselves to function, and makes no attempt to explain what directs the mechanisms that do the organizing. - DAVID: I appreciate your reading it. The article is not meant to supply what you seem to hope for. It simply shows how complex the art/act of living happens to be. - First of all, I cannot repeat too often how much I appreciate the trouble you take in presenting us with all this material. However, your conclusion was that the essay showed Shapiro was wrong - i.e. that cells are not intelligent. And so I'm sorry to say the article “is not meant to supply what you seem to hope for”. It has nothing to do with intelligence versus automaticity and “makes no attempt to explain what directs the mechanisms that do the organizing”. Let me assure you that I have always been acutely aware of the complexity of living organisms, and this complexity has always been a major factor in my own arguments against atheism. I have also accepted that much of the activity of cells HAS to be automatic for organisms to work (as exemplified by our bodily functions, or by bacterial acquisition of information). My hypothesis is that it ceases to be automatic when problems arise (the need for adaptation), or when innovations take place (exploitation of changed conditions). That is when we have processes of problem-solving and decision-making that demand intelligence. You continue to have faith that these have all been preprogrammed or personally “guided” by your God and that your God (theistic version of my hypothesis) did not give cells/cell communities the autonomy to make their own decisions. The rest of your post once again shifts attention from the problem of what directs cellular behaviour to the behaviour itself.