Biological complexity: more cell pore complexity (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 06, 2016, 13:07 (3123 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Finally, the hypothesis over which we disagree concerns how evolution works, not how the mechanism for evolution came into existence…
DAVID: I feel the complexity demands guidance. the cell nuclear pore is just one of hundreds of examples, perhaps thousands.
dhw: Yes, thousands, perhaps millions. According to you, EVERY innovation, plus EVERY lifestyle, plus EVERY natural wonder demands advanced planning and “guidance” (preprogramming or personal dabbling) by your God, because they are ALL too complex for organisms to work out for themselves. When I ask how God did all this, you complain that I am demanding exactitudes which you cannot provide. I cannot provide exactitudes either, which is why the autonomous, inventive mechanism (intelligence - possibly designed by your God) remains a hypothesis. But the hypothesis is not going to be sunk by your feeling that all evolutionary complexities demand your God's “guidance”!-DAVID: Our gulf in thought is shown in this statement of yours. I am incredulous at the complexity and recognize how difficult it is to plan for. You recognize the complexity (sort of) and hunt for any other possible explanation except God. I don't know how God did it, but you have no idea how the complexity might have happened. You don't accept chance, and then hope cells are smart enough on their own to figure it out, while offering the sop that perhaps God helped. Hard to balance on that fence.-I'm afraid the gulf extends to your interpretation of my thought. I do not “sort of” recognize the complexity. I am as incredulous as you. It is a major factor in my rejecting atheism, and as an agnostic I do not “hunt for any other possible explanation except God”. I hunt for an explanation of evolution that will exclude random mutations as the driving force of innovation (which I find so unconvincing). But it must also account for what I see as the higgledy-piggledy history of countless species coming and going without any apparent overall linking purpose - in stark contrast to the “planning” that seems to be your starting-point. I therefore find your anthropocentric theory of divine preprogramming and/or dabbling for every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder every bit as unconvincing as random mutations. The discovery that so many scientists believe in cellular intelligence seems to me to offer a possible explanation for the higgledy-piggledy course of evolution, but I have emphasized from the very beginning that it does not exclude your God, who for me remains a 50/50 possible source of the (hypothetical) intelligent and inventive cell. My hypothesis is neither “hope” nor “sop” nor ”help”. It is an alternative to chance, to your divine “guidance” of every step, and to your anthropocentric reading of your God's mind. I suspect the latter is the main reason for your hostility, but an alternative reading of your God's mind and of evolutionary history is not hunting “for any other possible explanation except God”.