Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 24, 2016, 13:40 (3105 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: As regards purpose, your God also said, somewhat cryptically: “I'm complexifying the pre-whale and the pre-giraffe, because my aim is to produce humans.” Mine said, "Just do what you wanner do." Which of those is more likely to lead to the higgledy-piggledy bush?
DAVID: I wish we had a reasonable story for whales, giraffes and all the other oddball items in the h-p bush. You are certainly correct that complexifying is present. And since the human brain is the most complex thing evolution has produced, it must be the pinnacle and end point, currently, of that process. And you are correct that God might have let the process do 'just do what you wanner do', and then, I assume, dropped in from time to time to help with problems that developed as complexity went too far. No complexification mechanism is in sight in current research. Unless it is found, and epigenetics is a weak possibility, external intervention is a reasonable conclusion.-Thank you for this conciliatory post. We all wish we had a reasonable story, not only for whales etc. but for life itself! I agree that humans are the most complex species in terms of what we have created through our extraordinary degree of consciousness, and I am delighted at your acknowledging the possibility that God may have given organisms the means to conduct their own evolution. But with my theistic hat still on, I'm a little surprised at your reason for God dropping in. I can think of at least three different reasons: 1) to get rid of organisms because he's had enough of them; 2) to allow organisms a wider range of inventiveness by changing the environment, e.g. increasing the amount of oxygen; 3) to experiment. The latter would, for instance, allow for special attention to pre-humans, as he worked on them to produce a being “in his own image”. (I too can be conciliatory!) You are of course quite right that no autonomous inventive mechanism - complexification is your term, not mine - has been found, just as no evidence for divine intervention has been found (your explanation that God hides himself does not help the case), but the very fact that some scientists believe cells/cell communities to be intelligent does at least give us a possible starting point.-dhw: My point is that your God was willing to set up “a mechanism that can act without his control”. If he gave humans a freedom of choice between right and wrong, he could also have given other organisms the freedom to work out their own ”complexifications”. 
DAVID: Not the same. Our ability of introspection and moralizing is due to consciousness, a result of complexification. Free will/ free choice comes with that. Increasing complexity is built into evolution, so organisms may have a way of increasing it but only humans ended up with a consciousness mimicking God's.-You left out the fact that I said it was not the same! (“I am not comparing an evolutionary free-for-all to moral choice!”) My only point was to show that your God was willing to give up control.-dhw: Having a relationship with someone does not mean comparing levels of consciousness. If your God's purpose was to create humans, he must have had a reason. You suggested a relationship with us. You also clearly believe that he is aware of right and wrong: otherwise how could he give us the choice? Once you open the door to human attributes, you can hardly close it if I suggest one (boredom) you don't like… 
DAVID: Religions give us reasons for God's activities and relationship to us. I simply say I don't know. Adler said God was responsive to our prayers on a 50/50 level of probability. You try to assign human attributes, i.e., boredom, as a way of exploring your concept of God. Don't try. There is no way of knowing. This is not an area of knowledge that has any degree of exactitude, when we have to work backward from what we see. All religion is guesswork.-Of course it is. And currently all the theories relating to the origin of life and to the mechanism that drives evolution are also guesswork, but that doesn't and shouldn't stop us from trying to find answers to these unsolved mysteries. You yourself have tried to explain how and why God started the process of evolution, and I am doing the same but offering a different view. Both of us are looking for a pattern to explain “what we see”, and there is no reason at all why we should not apply our pattern-forming reason to your God's actions just as we do to every other aspect of our existence. The fact that there cannot be any definitive answers did not stop you writing two excellent books exploring an area of knowledge that has no degree of exactitude, working backward from what you think you see, and coming up with a conclusion that can only be guesswork: “Science is finding God”.