Biological complexity: more cell pore complexity (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 11, 2016, 13:02 (3118 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Yes, the balance of nature is everywhere, and it keeps changing as conditions change, some species flourish and others disappear. Nature takes its own course. But according to you, God has had to “guide” all these coming-and-going natural wonders - since the organisms are incapable of organizing themselves - so that humans could appear and eat. THAT is the disconnection I keep pointing out.-DAVID: Evolution had to continue, so all who survived had to eat. It is still happening. Note your chocolate! Without balance, no chocolate, imagine.-Yes, organisms have to eat to survive, but that doesn't mean they only survive in order to produce or feed humans. I do not believe for one minute that your God taught the weaverbird to build its nest so that I could have my chocolate. And I'm happy to say I firmly believe that if there were no more weaverbirds around, I would still have my chocolate. Ditto the bugs in the flowers, the wasp larvae on the spider, and the cuttlefish with its camouflage. And if a terrible disease wiped out all the cacao trees in the world, I would tell you through my tears: “It's all part of the higgledy-piggledy, unplanned history of evolution.” And you would reply, “No, God is balancing Nature, because his plan has always been for you to eat soya beans.”-dhw: We should distinguish between improvement, innovation, variation and complexity. Every surviving innovation will be an improvement and will entail an increase in complexity, but increased complexity does not necessarily mean innovation; variations may increase complexity; I don't know where exactly one draws the line between innovative improvements and variations, but I would regard the human brain as a variation of increased complexity, and an improvement, but not an innovation.
DAVID: I disagree. you have a good discussion going and then denigrate the huge advance of consciousness in human brains!-No denigration. All our fellow animals have brains. The human brain is not an innovation, and there are many similarities between it and other brains. That does not mean human consciousness is not a huge advance on chimp consciousness. Of course it is. I only gave this as an example of variations on existing physical organs. The same applies to the eagle's eyes, the dog's nose and any other organ you can think of: my point is that all these organs were innovations at one time, and were improvements that increased complexity; variations may also increase complexity, but we would not necessarily regard them as improvements: how do you measure whether the crocodile's eyes are an “improvement” over a sparrow's eyes? They are simply different, and suit the organism concerned. That is how evolution seems to me to work: each organism finding (or not finding) its own means of survival and/or improvement.-dhw: When Billy Bacterium swallowed a what's-it and they became the first eukaryote, it didn't mean that every bacterium should then have changed into a eukaryote! 
DAVID: The emergence of a nuclear membrane was a major event not done by swallowing. That is the mitochondria theory. From Carl Woese:
"Next comes the evolution of the eucaryotic cell itself. While biologist have traditionally seen it as a step (saltation) beyond the stage of bacterial cells, I do not.” [...]-So Woese disagrees with Margulis. I'll leave that discussion to the experts. Ours concerned the fact that bacteria are still bacteria, and my point was that when innovations take place, that doesn't mean every individual organism will switch to being the new organism. Bacteria have stayed bacteria, whereas eukaryotes - no matter how they came into being - gave rise to the multicellularity which produced evolutionary innovation. You can't use unchanging bacteria as evidence that humans didn't have to happen and therefore God geared evolution to the production of humans. As I keep saying, NO other life form had to happen.
 
dhw: I really don't see how you can deny that evolution has proceeded through a drive for improvement. I would also suggest that from the beginnings of multicellularity, increased complexity has been the result of the drive for improvement rather than a drive for complexity resulting in improvement.
DAVID: Complexity is not necessarily improvement: Whales!-I didn't say it was. I said innovation meant increased complexity. See above. You have said that it is the divinely guided “drive to complexity” that propels evolution. My point is that evolution is propelled by the (possibly God-given) drive for improvement, which gives rise to complexity. And I still don't understand why you object, since it fits into your scenario (always improving till God finally produces humans) just as snugly as it fits into mine (all innovations stem from individual organisms looking to improve), whereas you quite rightly point out that the ‘drive to complexity' in itself would NOT necessarily mean improvement.