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

by dhw, Wednesday, November 16, 2016, 12:19 (2928 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You asked earlier how individuals choose the same DNA changes, and I answered: “Because the cell communities [not "populations"] are coping with or exploiting the same environment”. If you have a group of individuals in a particular location where there is a particular change in environmental conditions, it stands to reason that the members of that group will make the same adjustments.
DAVID: The word adjustment means adaptation or modification. I'm discussing speciation, which means much more change than that.

I use the terms “coping with” to indicate adaptation, and “exploiting” to indicate innovation. NOBODY knows how speciation took place, but we know that adaptation happens, and I am suggesting that the same mechanism works for both. Your objection does not remove the logic of my argument explaining how individuals come to choose the same DNA changes, whether it’s adaptation or innovation.

dhw: You don’t need math to tell you that any new species needs at least two to tango. “Starting numbers” does not mean large numbers.
DAVID: I understand that. Just a small number of surviving males and females with matched DNA will do.

Thank you. Goodbye to the red herring of large numbers.

dhw: I have questioned the likelihood of the first cells having on board every single code that led to every single innovation and natural wonder in the history of life, let alone the likelihood of their descendants also being able to pass them all on through the next 3.8 billion years.
DAVID: Cell division means that what is present is passed onto daughter cells, unless an error is made. Modifications of DNA occur between cell division.

How does that support the hypothesis that the first cells contained and passed on millions and millions of programmes?

dhw: If you consider it possible that “just a few” unicellular organisms could contain and pass on millions of programmes for multicellular organisms, why do you consider it impossible that a few multicelluilar organisms can pass on ONE new programme?
DAVID: Because sex requires both partners have the same new DNA modifications.

Explained above, and you have now agreed that you only need a few individuals, so why continue the argument?

DAVID: There is not enough time for the dominant recessive gene play to work according to the math folks and evolution math folks. One new program is modification and I'm theorizing about speciation.

If you believe in common descent, both adaptation and innovation entail modifications in existing organisms, but innovations bring something new, whereas adaptations enable the organism to remain itself. There may not be enough time for chance to create speciation, but if God’s programmes can do it, so can intelligent organisms. The only rational objection you have raised so far to my hypothesis is that, although some experts believe in cellular intelligence, nobody has yet come up with evidence that cell communities are intelligent enough to do the inventing. Fair enough. And similarly, nobody has yet come up with evidence that chance can do the inventing, or that God preprogrammed the first cells with every innovation and natural wonder, or God dabbled. We are all theorizing.