Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 12, 2016, 10:50 (3055 days ago) @ David Turell

Once again I am telescoping threads, as they all relate to logic and evolution. - Dhw (under “Naledi”): I am delighted that at long last we are in agreement about possibilities. You don't need to remind me about single cells, since I have been arguing for several years now that instead of the first cells containing programmes for every single innovation and natural wonder in the history of life (your hypothesis, plus dabbling), they may have contained an autonomous inventive mechanism for life and evolution. And I have conceded that the autonomous inventive mechanism may have been designed by your God. - DAVID: We still have a smidgen of difference: my version of the autonomous IM has more God controls than yours, in which it is set totally free to perform by God, and mine which follows guidelines of complexity steering evolution toward humans. - It is the autonomy of the IM that is essential for my hypothesis. Complexity for its own sake fits in with the idea of God enjoying the pretty patterns produced by the IM, but “guidelines” that produce the weaverbird's nest as a "complexity steering evolution toward humans" make no sense at all to me. “Steering evolution toward humans” could be done by dabbling, and this would allow for the combination of what you call “hands off” (complete autonomy) and “control” (God dabbling for his own purposes). Then we wouldn't have to wonder why he is so concerned about the weaverbird's nest that he has to design it himself - as if life could not go on without it! But that is the “possibility” you seem unable to accept: that organisms such as insects and weaverbirds may be capable of intelligent design without your God's guidance. - dhw: (under “insects”) However, if you truly believe that your God inserted programmes into the first amoeba and the first bacteria to provide solutions to every problem that life would throw at them over the next umpteen billion years - or alternatively he pops in to give them further instructions as and when new problems arise - so be it. - DAVID: Even Darwin scientists point out that advancing mutations actually involve loss of initial information in DNA. Working that backward as in the Big Bang theory approach, how much more information was in the initial DNA of life? Perhaps all programmed from the beginning! - I can understand how an “advancing” mutation might jettison inherited information that is no longer necessary. But please explain why saltations that introduce new inventions such as kidneys, brains, sex, the senses etc. would require or result in a loss rather than a gain of information. - DAVID: And how did single cells store information to pass on to groups of cells?

dhw: I don't understand the point of your question. All cells store information, and cells communicate. If you are asking me where the ability to store information and to communicate came from, my answer is that I don't know, but it may have been your God.
DAVID: Thank you. Cells can modify their DNA as Shapiro shows, which changes the use of information and this suggests that all the information needed for evolution may have been present from the beginning. - Once again, I cannot follow your logic. The ability of cells to modify their DNA is essential for evolution to advance. And so the potential for acquiring information from outside and for changing information inside must indeed have been present from the beginning if we believe in common descent. But that potential is what I call the autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism, which has the power to process the ever changing information (conditions) from outside and to adjust its own information (structure) from inside. That does not mean that every possible response (adaptive and innovative) to every future environmental change was “present from the beginning”. So please explain precisely what you mean by “all the information needed for evolution” in this context.