Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 12, 2016, 12:30 (2965 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Once again: our starting point on this thread was the origin of human language, which entailed the range of animal sounds being vastly expanded by a readjustment of all the vocal organs. You insist that God did this with a dabble, and THEN humans learned how to use it. I suggest that with their enhanced awareness (= exploring new territory), they needed new sounds and, in trying to make them, they initiated the changes.

DAVID: You can't make the new sounds unless the apparatus is present. The human desire made it happen? We cannot think improvements. They have to appear in new biologic forms, which must be created with planning to organize the new component parts. I'm still pointing out the gaps in form.

Back we go to the fact that nobody knows how these changes took place. But they did take place. The issue between us on this thread is your theory that God made the equipment and the organisms then learned how to use it. I offer the alternative: that under new conditions, organisms needed new equipment and (theistic version) God gave them the means to make it, i.e. God did not give fish legs and then they learned how to walk, and God did not reorganize the vocal organs and then humans learned how to talk; instead fish needed to walk and therefore changed their fins to legs, and humans needed to talk and therefore reorganized their vocal organs. An extension of the processes by which organisms are known to adapt themselves to changing conditions. This is not a matter of fish/humans thinking to themselves: “Change!” It is the individual cell communities responding cooperatively and intelligently to the overall requirements of the organism.

DAVID: I'll repeat. We only have large gaps between the transitional forms we have found. Your process only fits tiny steps, unless you want to claim that organisms themselves can create saltational-equivalent gaps in the record and solve the complex issues of coordinating new functional parts.

We don’t know how many transitional forms your God or my organisms needed. I’m mystified that your God should have needed to dabble/preprogramme any transitional forms at all since he is supposed to know precisely what he’s doing. That was why I asked you originally if you thought he had given fish fully formed legs before they left the water – but you declined to answer. However, yes, my hypothesis allows both for transitional forms and saltations, because it does indeed depend on cell communities having the intelligence (perhaps God-given) to solve all the complex issues of coordinating new functional parts.

DAVID: Your 'form of evolvable intelligence' is the original provision of alternative pathways. Bacteria can solve problems of survivability on their own.dhw: Alternative pathways are simply all the potential solutions to all the problems. It takes intelligence to work out which one fits. You appear to accept this, unless your second sentence is a misprint.
DAVID: Not a misprint. You miss the point that bacteria have the ability to use alternative pathways if a primary pathway is no longer useful. All built in.

The ability to find the right solution out of countless possibilities is what I would call intelligence, and yes, it is built in.

dhw: (re the viper): No need for God to keep stepping in if he simply gives organisms the ability to organize their own ways of survival.
DAVID: The false viper had to watch the real viper and then say to itself, I need to change my eye pupils for safety. It is easy for you to say adaptation which we see happen, but in this circumstance it is not easy to imagine a way it might happen. Just as it is not easy to imagine how butterflies have fake eye camouflage. All mimicry might be saltations!

I agree that it is not easy to imagine. Nor is it easy to imagine your God stepping in and giving the false viper a lesson, or providing the first living cells with a programme for fake eye camouflage to pass down through billions of years to false vipers and butterflies once they have come into existence.

David’s comment (under “engulfing photosynthesis”): The same process that resulted in mitochondria being made from engulfed bacteria. Could God have provided this mechanism to help evolution advance. Less dabbling for Him as a result.
dhw: It was precisely this process of endosymbiosis that formed the basis of Margulis’s theory of evolution, and the further we take the concept of intelligent cooperation, the less dabbling and preprogramming your God has to do. Like Shapiro and others, Margulis had no doubt that microorganisms are intelligent.

DAVID: Yes they are built to act as if intelligent, but other than the editing of their DNA for adaptation without speciation they are automatic.

I’ll settle for their being intelligent enough to edit their own DNA. Nobody knows how speciation took place, but if single cells can intelligently edit their own DNA, it is clearly possible that multicellular organs can also be intelligent enough to edit their own DNA, which means that potentially they can also be intelligent enough to create new structures. Hence evolution. Bingo.