How children pick up a language: new review of Wolfe (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, November 11, 2016, 12:00 (2933 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The degree of intelligence shown by Shapiro is limited to the ability to recode their DNA to alter their adaptations to variable stress, no more……

I offered two quotes in which Shapiro explicitly describes cellular intelligence.

dhw: ….You could hardly have a clearer rejection of your theory that bacteria are automatons, and when asked why people reject his view, he responded “Large organisms chauvinism”. He may be wrong, but please don’t make out that he is not a proponent of cellular intelligence.
DAVID: Of course he is. He has shown the cells' abilities.

And I keep calling upon his conclusions, along with those of other experts such as McClintock and Margulis and Albrecht-Bühler, in support of my hypothesis of cellular intelligence. I know you disagree, but please bear those quotes in mind next time you try to downplay Shapiro's commitment to this hypothesis.

dhw: Please give me a reference to Wistar refuting the idea that speciation occurred through a few individuals who passed on their innovations to future generations. (In any case, what possible evidence could you and they have?)DAVID: Wistar is entirely a mathematical look at generational time scales and mutation rates and concludes Darwin style evolution is impossible. Never refuted! Note the quote above.
dhw: Thank you. Absolutely nothing to do with your claim that speciation must take place in large numbers right from the start. Simply the same old attack on gradualism and chance, agreed on over and over and over again.

DAVID: Of course it refutes, if the math never works. It shows a few similar new mutations can't do it.

Can’t do what? Wistar refutes the claim that random mutations can cause speciation in the time available. It says nothing about a large number of individual organisms being needed to start a new species. If it does, please give me the reference (and the evidence).

DAVID: I treat God as emotionless, because it is not fair for me to try to imagine his emotions.

dhw: Not fair? On whom? Speculating on God’s purpose means attempting to read his mind. Your reading is that he wants relations with us, mine is that maybe he enjoys watching us. I really can’t see why yours is “fair” and mine is “unfair”.
DAVID: I did not imply your view is unfair. I use the word fair to confer my feeling that His emotional state is not a fair consideration, since He is such a different personage.

Fair on whom? You keep demanding “purpose” from me, which is impossible to do without attributing some human-type thought to God, and in this respect I see no difference between wanting a relationship and enjoying the spectacle. And once again: I think it is not unreasonable to assume that your God is unlikely to have created something he knew absolutely nothing about, e.g. emotion, let alone to want relations with beings whose nature is totally unfamiliar to him.

dhw: I have offered you a very clear hypothesis explaining the profusion of life forms: namely that organisms have the intelligence (perhaps God-given) to pursue their own course of life. That accounts for every weirdness, since they all have different ways of using the environment. Balance makes no sense when 90%+ organisms disappear and the balance never stays the same.
DAVID: 99% of all species are gone, and balance is always present. Balance must be important.

What kind of balance is always present? You have complained on another thread about ”Man making a bad balance”. What is the criterion for good versus bad? Continued existence, maybe? Your God (the version in which he is in tight control) apparently designs and destroys 99% of species, so the balance is bad for 99% of species and good for the surviving 1%. The balance keeps changing. If the human race is wiped out and only bacteria are left on Planet Earth, you will still have a balance. And if Planet Earth disappears, the universe will still have a balance, because it will still exist. The argument is meaningless!