First multicellularity: algae (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, May 16, 2016, 16:21 (3111 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: God guiding the weaverbird has nothing to do with the intention to produce/feed humans, and the fact that all surviving organisms must have something to eat is another non sequitur, since humans do not need to eat the weaverbird's nest.
DAVID: Of course it relates. The lifestyle of the weavers has them raise chicks in the nest. If humans hunt the weavers for food, or eat the predators of weavers it is all part of the pattern of food for all.-Your point has always been that the nest itself was too complex to have been designed by the weavers. Most birds raise chicks in their nests, but God specifically had to design this particularly complex nest because…because…otherwise we would not have been able to eat weavers or their predators? And God had to specially train one particular type of wasp to lay its larvae on a spider's back, because otherwise humans would not have been able to eat…um…these particular wasps or their predators? Multiply these examples by the 99% of all species (extinct) which we couldn't have eaten anyway. Cohesive argument? -dhw: Do even your fellow theist researchers accept your theory that God implanted the first cells with instructions to enable bacteria to cope with every single problem for the next 3.8 billion years and onwards?
DAVID: It is my impression that theistic research accepts my automatic molecular response theory, and they think God guided evolution or created per Tony. I don't anyone (theistic) thinks bacteria contain the code for every problem from the beginning. That is your extrapolation of my comments.-You stated that God gave the instructions for bacteria to solve their problems, but not currently (“no instructions in present time”) - and so unless he kept popping in new instructions every time there was a new problem right up until now (an equally far-fetched scenario), he must have put them in at the beginning.
 
(Thank you for the epigenetics article, which I will tackle when I have more time.)
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1894 -dhw: If the bird has the intelligence to design something so complex, where can you draw the line?... The nest is the start of the slippery slope towards God giving organisms the means (intelligence) to innovate autonomously, thus creating the higgledy-piggledy bush.
DAVID: You are mixing up my approach. The nest is not the bush. The bush is body forms (whale, platypus) and the nest is a form of lifestyle. -No mix-up. Your argument has always been that God directs evolutionary innovations (which include body forms), AND lifestyles AND natural wonders, because they are all too complex for organisms to design for themselves. I have always distinguished between them, but once you accept that organisms (cell communities) are intelligent enough to organize one (e.g. the nest), you open the door to the others, including innovation - new body forms etc. - which leads to the bush.
 
dhw: If your drive to complexity is “free-ranging”, as you suggest in your protozoa post, you now appear to agree that organisms organize their own complexities (innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders) except when God dabbles. 

DAVID: Not what I am proposing. Free-ranging refers to phenotype only, which in some cases will lead to strange lifestyles as a secondary effect.-And that is the whole point of my hypothesis: that the process of innovation which has led to the different phenotypes - i.e. evolution itself - is the result of organisms having a “free-ranging” ability to design them autonomously, whereas you have always insisted that God guides them ALL.-DAVID: Based on a structuralism approach, God may have put in the evolutionary process a mechanism for increasingly complex structural changes, which would allow the development of a range of different lifestyles.-Theistically, that is clearly what happened, since these complex changes and lifestyles took place. But if God did not “guide” every single innovation (structural change), lifestyle and natural wonder, the mechanism he put in must have given organisms the ability to create them autonomously.
 
DAVID: I'm not a deist. God watches all of it. I'm inclined to think if the complexification mechanism is made thorough enough, it would result in His dabbling more at the lifestyle level, since the resulting organisms need guidance.-Either the complexification mechanism (which is what I have called the mechanism for innovation) is preprogrammed/dabbled with, or organisms do their own innovating without specific “guidance”, and that entails what I call cellular intelligence. The intelligence to innovate would also be used to design lifestyles (e.g. migration) and natural wonders (e.g. complex nests), though God may sometimes intervene. Stark choice for you, using your own terms: does God “guide” every complexification (innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder) or do organisms do it autonomously apart from when he occasionally dabbles?