Biological complexity: how we smell odors (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 29, 2016, 13:28 (2882 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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).-DAVID: I'm just testing out an extension of my original concept from my first book, a drive to complexity. Direct programming or dabbling still remains an issue, which of course, cannot be resolved. But a free complexity mechanism sure explains the weird bush of adaptations.-I am happy that you are now testing out an alternative to your God's preprogramming or dabbling for every innovation and natural wonder in evolutionary history. An autonomous inventive mechanism based on intelligence sure explains the weird bush of functioning adaptations and innovations, not to mention such natural wonders as the weaverbird's nest.-dhw: 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. ..... we still have the same autonomous mechanism producing the same results, yours still by Darwinian luck, mine still by cellular intelligence. 
DAVID: As I have previously explained what appears to be cellular intelligence are purposeful-acting molecular reactions appearing as a neural network look-alike, supported by my recent entry. (Friday, May 27, 2016, 19:12)-A neural network look-alike does not preclude intelligence, any more than a neural network precludes intelligence. I very much doubt that the researchers who confronted the bacteria with “previously un-encountered environmental conditions” concluded that your God had either preprogrammed the bacterial response 3.8 billion years ago or had popped into the laboratory to give the bacteria instructions. The experiment neither supports nor contradicts your belief that bacteria cannot think.