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

by dhw, Wednesday, November 23, 2016, 12:20 (2921 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Excellent summary. If you reject chance (d) as I do, I do not see how you can implant intelligence into the first cells from their beginning (c), from which all other cells come. Were the first cells dumb but somehow learned from experience? That is trial and error and comes back to chance (d). If they are intelligent from the beginning of life, where did that intelligence come from? Intelligence always implies teaching or experience or both.

dhw: As usual, when we are discussing the different ways in which evolution might have worked, you scurry back to origins in order to skate over the problems of your own hypothesis. Here, as always, I have specified that the initial intelligence may have come from God. That is what I mean by “perhaps God-given”.

DAVID: And you always scurry back to complaining about my insistence on including the original cells in a continuum to present life. There is no gap between the first cells and all subsequent cells. The only gaps are between species forms and processes. We don't know how life originated, but whatever caused life to appear as the first cell included all the organizational basis for life we see in subsequent cells present today. Just because Darwin threw away 'origin' in his theory, doesn't mean you can continue to ignore the continuum from the beginning in our current debate. Note I have left out God, as not needed for the concept of life's continuum.

No such complaint from me. I have already included the original cells as the start of the continuum. You have accurately summarized the principle of common descent, as opposed to separate creation, echoing my own insistence that every innovation must take place in existing organisms. That is the continuum of common descent. Your hypothesis is that the first cells were preprogrammed with every non-dabbled innovation and natural wonder throughout the history of life, whereas mine is that innovations and natural wonders are the products of cellular intelligence. Since I explicitly accept the theory of common descent (life's continuum), and since you explicitly “do not see how you can implant intelligence into the first cells from their beginning”, and since I explicitly point out – as I have done all the way through this discussion – that “the initial intelligence may have come from God” (“initial” means “happening at the beginning”), I don’t know how you can possibly accuse me of ignoring the continuum from the beginning. Nice try, though.