Teleology & evolution: Stephen Talbott's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, June 12, 2016, 12:47 (3086 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The mechanisms don't need intelligence to run them. They are not driving an automobile but sitting in a driverless automobile.
dhw; How can an autonomous inventive or complexification mechanism create new organs, lifestyles, ”natural wonders” without being intelligent? The word “autonomous” means able to determine one's own actions, take one's own decisions, and in this case do one's own inventing/complexifying.-DAVID: Look carefully at my driverless car analogy. The complexity mechanism sitting somewhere in a layer of the genome looks at preceding patterns and has the ability to add layers of new complexity. The cell can turn on the mechanism in response to some external stimulus, more oxygen, predator threats, ice age, etc. The cell is the passenger with an on-off switch for an intelligently designed CM. The cell does not intelligence to do this, just recognize the opportunity environmental stimulus and trip the switch.-“Looks at preceding patterns and has the ability to add layers of complexity…in response to some external stimulus” is the key to the whole process. Your whole analogy is false. A driverless car does not produce innovations. To look at something that exists and then create something new requires intelligence. You yourself have (in my view quite rightly) argued over and over again that adding layers of complexity that create functioning new organs requires intelligent design. If the innovations have not been preprogrammed or divinely dabbled, the intelligent design can only come from the cells themselves, which means they have autonomous intelligence (the inventive mechanism), not that they follow “on-board instructions”. In my scenario, the “brain equivalent” (intelligence/inventive mechanism) of the cell communities says: “Predator threats! We must start inventing.” In yours, the message is: “Predator threats! Turn on God's 3.8-billion-year-old complexity programme containing on-board instructions for predator threats!” Or alternatively: “Predator threats! Better call God to come and invent something!” Sorry, but I don't know how you can call that a free, autonomous inventive/complexification mechanism.-dhw; We are back to square one! On Thursday 9 June you agreed that an autonomous inventive mechanism was possible, and that your God would have provided it and may have dabbled “to correct problems” (i.e. after the innovation had been autonomously created). Now you are excluding that possibility and reverting to the hypothesis that all the innovations were preprogrammed, and the cellular communities have no autonomy but merely follow instructions!
DAVID: See explanation above.-See explanation above.