Biological complexity: how we smell odors (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, May 28, 2016, 11:35 (3102 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: What I think is beyond question, though, is that in many organisms the sense of smell performs a much wider range of functions than awareness of a predator: alertness to danger, communication, identification, marking out territory, sexual attraction, the hunt for food etc., all of which are essential to survival. I really can't see how the development of any of the senses can be regarded as complexification for its own sake when each of them is so useful in its own right. We know of course that organisms can survive without them, but does anyone seriously believe that having them is not an improvement over not having them?-DAVID: My interpretation is quite different. Of course, a complex result which is successful will be an improvement. The basic drive is to create complexity to achieve that result. I view 'drive to complexity' as a shotgun approach, and then, per Darwin, what works stays. Your 'seeking improvement' approach sounds more theistically teleological than an agnostic should sound. -A remarkable twist. From having your God maintaining control and carefully planning every innovation and natural wonder, either preprogramming or organizing them all personally, you have suddenly switched to him allowing organisms to do their own thing (yippee for autonomy!) and leaving it to chance whether their purposeless complexifications will actually work (other than when he dabbles). “God guides everything” becomes “Go forth and complexify, and let us hope for the best - except when I dabble.” I love it.-Theistic teleology? If your God designed the autonomous mechanism, I'd suggest he wanted to see what it would come up with (apart from when he dabbled - which leaves scope for special favourites like us humans). Then the only difference between our versions is that your God made organisms seek to complexify for the sake of complexifying, whereas mine made them seek to survive and/or improve. Your mechanism luckily comes up with readymade (saltational) eyes, livers, kidneys, wings by shotgun complexifications, much like Darwin's random mutations without his gradualism, and mine works out how to construct them. If God did not design the mechanism - atheistic version - we still have the same autonomous mechanism producing the same results, yours still by Darwinian luck, mine still by cellular intelligence (See “protozoa” for further discussion.)