Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, 12:56 (3105 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.
DAVID: God steps in (in my view) to make sure that evolution stays on course to produce humans. The bush is allowed to spread as it wishes. - With my theistic hat on, I was surprised at your assumption that God stepped in to “help with problems that developed as complexity went too far”. However, my next sentence concerning experimentation was: “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””. With God allowing the bush to spread as it wishes (which can only mean organisms having autonomy) - apart from when he dabbles - it seems we are rapidly reaching agreement on our theistic interpretation of evolution. Under “Our reality keeps evolving”, however, you wrote: - “You keep wondering about the bushiness of the bush. This is what complexity for the sake of complexity brings. It also brings the most complex of all, humans, in phenotype and in consciousness. If we could find the mechanism for complexification, perhaps then we would know how much freedom God gave it. Now it is guesswork.” - It makes far more sense to me that organisms and/or your God should look for different means of survival/improvement, rather than complexity just for the sake of complexity. It is perfectly feasible that the giraffe and the whale developed as they did because at the time these changes gave them a better chance of acquiring food. I find it difficult to believe that they (autonomously) or your God (dabbling) would have decided on a longer neck or a life on the ocean wave just for the sake of their becoming more complex. The quest for survival/improvement (whether pursued autonomously or by God's dabbling) would also result in pre-humans eventually becoming more conscious, more intelligent, more flexible, more inventive than all other species. But I agree totally with your final remark: the extent of autonomy, the extent of God's interventions, and the existence of the mechanism and indeed of God himself are all matters of guesswork. What we have are hypotheses, but in terms of how evolution works, an autonomous inventive mechanism provides a convincing explanation for the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution.
 
dhw: 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: You still keep touting a small group of scientists to support your hypothesis. So be it. Their chance of being correct is no more than 50/50 and in my view much less. - If your God allowed the bush to spread of its own accord, apart from when he dabbled, there has to be an autonomous mechanism. That is why the “intelligent cell” (possibly designed by God) may well be the key to our understanding of evolutionary innovation. But of course it's still only a hypothesis.