Logic and evolution; an addendum (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 28, 2016, 12:21 (3039 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: True innovation requires advanced planning to coordinate call the new parts, as in the new Cambrian organisms. IMHO, your cell committees cannot do that. What is your answer for the Cambrian? Even Darwin was afraid of it unless intermediates were found, and they are not there.-IMHO my cell committees (possibly set up by your God in the first instance) are at least as likely as your 3.8-billion-year computer programme, or your God personally fiddling around with every single organism that sprouted a new organ. But these are all hypotheses, and it is no defence of your own to tell me that you don't believe mine!-dhw: As always, you focus on systems that are already functional and established. You and I are full of functional, established systems that work automatically. Only when something goes wrong or when there is a change in conditions is there the possibility that what works automatically will have to change.
DAVID: But this is the evidence living organisms present us, how they work, and how they respond to stimuli. And we know they can adapt by influencing the gene functionality. We don't how they might be able to invent totally new structures as in the Cambrian.Agreed. -That is why it is pointless for you to go on describing automatic activities, as if they somehow proved that cells are not capable of non-automatic activities.-DAVID: But what you want is single cells to be equivalent to complex organisms. No way. They are automatic. -My hypothesis does not regard bacteria as “equivalent” to complex organisms, but as organisms in their own right, and many scientists believe they are cognitive, intelligent, decision-making beings. You can state as often as you like that they are “automatic”, but that is your opinion, which is as impossible to justify objectively as that of the scientists with whom you disagree.
 
dhw: This is not a matter of WHAT the genes do, but a matter of what makes them do it, i.e. what guides the physical mechanisms to create the new organ. Your theory is that God has preprogrammed the mechanism or operates it through personal intervention. Mine is that they operate the mechanism themselves. An analysis of all the chemical processes will not give you a clue as to how cell communities (organisms) are able to solve new problems and to create new structures.
DAVID: I know that! Which is why my current proposals are as you outline. I can go no further because we don't understand speciation, and if we can never find a mechanism, God must be the agent.-There must be a mechanism, unless you now insist that your God personally fiddles with every single organism that does something new. (In which case, exit the whole of your preprogramming, it-was-all-there-at-the-beginning hypothesis.) The mechanism may have been designed by your God, and it may be autonomous. You have failed to find any logical flaws in such a hypothesis, in stark contrast to your own “current proposals”.