Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 31, 2016, 13:23 (3098 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is just that possibility I'm exploring, keeping in mind God is guiding.

dhw: I am happy that you are exploring it. But I would hate to see you lose your balance on a bit of slippery language. A “free complexity mechanism” that allows the bush “to spread as it wishes” cannot be “guided”. Your God may approve or disapprove of the products of the mechanism, and he may dabble, but it has to be autonomous. Otherwise, you are stuck with your 3.8-billion-year computer programme plus dabbling, with God responsible for every innovation and natural wonder, planning every branch of the weird bush.-DAVID: Your point is exactly correct. If complexification is a free property anything can happen. And God only steps in to dabble, which means modify a form or possibly change course. Go forth and multiply becomes go forth and complexify. A reasonable alternative.-I am delighted that you acknowledge its reasonableness. We now have a mechanism that is capable of producing new functioning complexities (innovations) without “guidance”. You have always, in my view quite rightly, rejected chance as the agent that can process the necessary information and assemble the new structure. So if your God has not programmed the innovation and does not produce it by dabbling, and you do not believe it can assemble itself by chance, it seems to me you are left with only one possible explanation: namely, that the mechanism itself has the intelligence to invent the innovation. And so we now have an autonomous intelligent, inventive mechanism. If you believe in common descent, then every single evolutionary innovation (not to mention every natural wonder) that is not the product of a separate creative act by God can only have been created by this mechanism possessed by individual organisms, and these are communities of cells. Whether you think the cell communities are motivated to change by a higgledy-piggledy quest for complexification for its own sake, or by a specifically targeted quest for their own survival or improvement, makes not the slightest difference to the nature of the mechanism itself: it is autonomous and it works out its own complexities or improvements or strategies for survival. This does not mean that every cell is inventive, but it does mean that there are cells which do the inventive thinking and coordinate with other cells to ensure that the whole community implements the new system. In any community, there are members that perform different roles. There is therefore no escaping the concept of cellular intelligence. You can of course claim that the all-important switch from unicellularity to multicellularity was the result of a dabble, but sooner or later autonomous cellular intelligence has to take over. Sooner of course = bacterial intelligence.