Biological complexity:how toxoplasmosis parasitizes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 06, 2016, 16:34 (2909 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: We are not talking about the origin of life, but the origin of the instructions that lead each individual organism to behave the way it does: you say that for humans the origin is our intelligence, but for bacteria every instruction has to come from God. That is the issue here.

You are gain skipping the point that original life HAD to come with instruction for how to run a living mechanism. Information of that sort requires origination in a mind.

dhw:What I pooh-pooh is your assumption that intelligence is impossible without a brain. The behaviour of cells suggests that this may not be true. 50/50.

My 50/50 which you are subverting is simply the possibilities of a view from outside the cell. Once inside it is obvious automaticity is what is going on.

DAVID: I have separate theories, not one all-inclusive theory to cover everything which you always seem try to do. I see no need for that all-inconclusiveness. In each area of thought I follow the known research findings.

dhw: If your separate theories contradict one another (see the massive gaps in your interpretation of evolutionary history), I think it is only right to question them. I am surprised to hear that “the known research findings” you claim to follow include a 3.8-billion-year computer programme installed by God in the first living cells for every evolutionary innovation and every natural wonder in the history of life (apart from those he dabbled).

I start with the observation above that first life had to have information to run on. Isn't DNA an intricate code? That is information which cannot develop by chance on a rocky planet.

dhw: …I’d like to remind you that apart from a possible divine, overall purpose for life itself, there is also the individual purpose (whether God-given or not) of organisms to survive and/or improve, which I have suggested is the driving force behind evolution.
DAVID: Preservation of life is implanted in all organism that struggle, or don't have to struggle, to survive. That doesn't explain why the original land mammals became whales at great complications to their original physiology. Defies all logic. You are back to Darwin and the concept of competition as the driving force. I reject that idea. It is back to the tautology of survival of the fittest.

dhw: As usual you ignore the second drive, which is for improvement. You also ignore the all-important contribution Margulis and others made to the debate by stressing the importance to evolution of cooperation, which of course is absolutely essential to the whole process of improvement and hence innovation.

Whales are not improvement, but the initiation of a complex life style requiring enormous physiologic and anatomic changes. A drive to complexity is what that signals.