New Oxygen research; pre-Ediacaran (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, July 24, 2016, 18:08 (3044 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I agree with you. Cell activity follows a plan by any of the routes you suggest. Where did the plan they follow come from?
dhw: According to my hypothesis, they worked it out for themselves.
DAVID: To which I respond. body plans starting with the Cambrian forms are too complex to happen in your simple way.-What do mean by my “simple way”? There is nothing simple about billions of cells cooperating to create a complex organ. But it is no more unlikely than each one of those billions of cells being individually programmed or personally directed by an unknown, unsourced superintelligence to fulfil its particular role. -DAVID: Do you really believe your theistic argument above? What you are saying is either God guided or God gave cells the ability to create body plans. Without God whaat is your alternative for body plans?
dhw: My alternative to your divine preprogramming and/or dabbling is that cells have the intelligence to cooperate in designing new functioning communities (creating body plans) which, in the course of millions and millions of years add more functioning communities, thus creating the bodies we know now. ... The agnostic version is that I do not know how life and intelligence came into being. My hypothesis concerning how evolution works can fit in with both theism and atheism.-DAVID: Spoken from the picket fence. Intelligence involves the ability to gain and store new information. understand and correlate that information, and then have the foresight to design the next plan for the future. I don't see how even your concept of cells can do that.-I know what intelligence involves, and apart from one, those are the very attributes that some scientists have identified in cells. However, “the foresight to design the next plan for the future” is not quite what I envisage. In my hypothesis, cell communities respond to changes in the environment. They do not anticipate those changes. Some cell communities will merely adjust their structure to cope with them (the known process of adaptation), but others will use the new information to innovate. As you say elsewhere: “If adaptation is not a form of innovation, what is?” We KNOW that cells alter their own structure to adapt. That is not planning for the future: it is an intelligent response to the requirements of the present. I suggest that innovation may be an extension of this process: an intelligent response to new opportunities offered by the present.