Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 01:54 (3098 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 02:04


> dhw: 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.-Twisting my concepts once again. A complexity mechanism is programmed to try new combinations of living form and processes. The intelligence is God's as the designer of the complexifier.-> dhw: 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 is your concept, not mine.-> dhw: 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.-Yipes, no. Give you an inch, you take miles.-> dhw: 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.-You are having fun.-Shapiro quote: " Genome change is not the result of accidents. If you have accidents and they're not fixed, the cells die. It's in the course of fixing damage or responding to damage or responding to other inputs—in the case I studied, it was starvation—that cells turn on the systems they have for restructuring their genomes. So what we have is something different from accidents and mistakes as a source of genetic change. We have what I call “natural genetic engineering.” Cells are acting on their own genomes in a large variety of well-defined non-random ways to bring about change.-"This is consistent with what Barbara McClintock first discovered in the 30s when she was studyng chromosome repair an then later in the 40s when her experiments uncovered transposable elements. All of these natural genetic engineering systems are regulated or sensitive to biological inputs. That sensitivity is what we've learned about cell regulation in general. As I say, cells don't act blindly, and they don't act blindly when they change their genomes." (my bold)-Comment: I know you will interpret Shapiro to fit the theory you desire, but my bolded segment can be interpreted by emphasizing the words 'regulated or sensitive' as indicating automatic molecular reactions in series or in feedback loops.