Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 13:04 (3097 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: …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.
DAVID: 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.-You have agreed to the possibility that what you call a “free complexity mechanism” allows the bush “to spread as it wishes”, and “God only steps in to dabble”. If so, the mechanism has to be autonomous, which means it has to come up with its own combinations! But yes, theistic version: God is the designer of the autonomous mechanism.
 
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 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.
DAVID: Yipes, no. Give you an inch, you take miles.-Organisms are cell communities. Once more: If they contain what you call a “free complexity mechanism”, the bush can “spread as it wishes”, and God “only steps in to dabble, which means modify a form or possibly change course”, please explain how the cell communities can cooperate to create the forms although their "free complexity mechanism" does NOT enable them to work these complexities out for themselves.
 
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.
DAVID: You are having fun.-Why is this argument not to be taken seriously?-DAVID, quoting Shapiro: " 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. (dhw's bold) 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. (dhw's bold)
"This is consistent with what Barbara McClintock first discovered in the 30s when she was studying chromosome repair and 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. (David's bold) As I say, cells don't act blindly, and they don't act blindly when they change their genomes." (dhw's bold)-David's 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.-Of course these systems respond to biological inputs and involve automatic molecular reactions and feedback loops. Our own intelligence works in the same way. Once we have absorbed and weighed the information and made our decision (non-automatic, unless you believe humans are also automatons), every action we take entails the same processes to implement those decisions. Since you know as well as I do that Shapiro believes in cellular intelligence, as did McClintock, you can hardly claim that three words removed from their context support your hypothesis. But perhaps you are "having fun"!