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

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 12, 2016, 15:19 (2746 days ago) @ dhw

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......It is the individual cell communities responding cooperatively and intelligently to the overall requirements of the organism.

I will stick to my point, that single celled organisms do not have the planning capacity to become multicellular, and multicellular organisms do not have he planning capacity for the gaps we see in evolution.

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.

dhw: We don’t know how many transitional forms your God or my organisms needed..... 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.

I repeat, all we see is gaps around the few transitional forms in the fossil library. Your reliance on transitional forms suggests you are imagining a series of tiny step transitions. They don't exist! The gaps strongly imply saltation.

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.

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

Yes, it looks like intelligence, but shifting from one pathway to another is the same as coming to a 'Y' on a walkway and trying to take preferred right not left, and choosing left because right is blocked. It is doing what you are able to do.

dhw; 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.

You can't imagine God stepping in. I can. He bothered to start a universe with life.

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.

dhw: 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.

Bacteria have to take care of themselves and are equipped to do it, 3.6 billion years after they started. Multicellular beings are to complex to make the jumps across gaps without careful planning which requires mentation. No Bingo.