Life's biologic complexity: Automatic molecular actions (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 07, 2016, 13:02 (2908 days ago) @ David Turell

As we are conducting the same argument on three different threads, I am putting them together.

Dhw: …You can’t explain why God didn’t start with humans. My hypothesis offers an explanation.
DAVID: You are correct. Your hypothesis fits the history. What I have done is to keep attacking your basic assumptions about cellular intelligence…
dhw: You are quite right to cast doubt on the question of just how inventive cellular intelligence might be. We don’t know. That is why it is NOT a basic assumption, but a hypothesis....
DAVID: This is a basic point of mine you keep skipping: "your apparent lack of recognition of the need for precise planning in advance for the complexity I've demonstrated.'

I have not skipped it. I have answered it: “The same applies both to adaptation and to innovation: until the environment demands or is suitable for change, the adaptation or invention cannot take place. We KNOW that organisms can change their genome in order to adapt. That is not advance planning, it is a reaction. What we don’t know is whether they can make the more complex changes involved in innovation. But it is a possibility that they can.”

DAVID: You almost never comment on my point about the whale series and the enormous physiologic alterations and phenotypical changes that are required for each next step in the eight or nine known. And: Whales are not improvement…A drive to complexity is what that signals.

Every new species (broad sense) requires enormous physiologic, phenotypical changes. We can only speculate about reasons for these changes. Maybe pre-whales found that food was more plentiful in the water than on the land. Maybe later changes improved locomotion and breathing and steering. I find it hard to believe that they were for no reason other than for God to make pre-whales more complex so that eventually humans could have special brains.

DAVID: Each biologic gap is huge with no forms showing a tiny alteration, which cellular intelligence might be capable of creating. In evolution all we see is major gaps, which is why Gould and Eldridge invented their hypothesis of punc-enq. Your approach is entirely wishful thinking.

That is how I believe common descent works: major changes occur in existing organisms as they learn to cope with - or improve their means of coping with - changing environments. I accept saltation (nature makes jumps), punctuated equilibrium, and the enormous complexities involved, and I offer the hypothesis that all these changes may be the products of an autonomous inventive intelligence, itself perhaps invented by your God. There is no wishful thinking. I am simply looking for a possible explanation of the evolutionary process that will close the huge gaps in the chance theory and in your own.

dhw: …an explanation that “fits the history” merits at least as much serious consideration as one that doesn’t.
DAVID: When it doesn't recognize the true complexity of the gaps it is not a serious contender for logic.

It is you who insist that I do not recognize the complexity, whereas I keep emphasizing that the complexity is a major reason for my rejecting atheism. However, this seems to be your best method of diverting attention away from the massive inconsistencies in your own account of how evolution works. Once more: NOBODY knows how speciation took place, and NOBODY knows how intelligent cells/cell communities are. That is why my hypothesis is only a hypothesis! But I would suggest that a hypothesis which fits the history is every bit as “serious a contender for logic” as one that doesn’t.

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.
DAVID: 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.

I pointed out that we cannot even get inside the thoughtful, decision-making mind of humans, and even you give odds of 50/50 for cells because it is impossible to get “inside”, so please don’t claim now that you CAN get inside and the obvious answer is 100% automaticity. We judge intelligence by watching behaviour, not by watching molecules.

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.
DAVID: 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.

A very good argument concerning the origin of life and the evolutionary mechanism. But you have a separate theory about how evolution has proceeded, and you claim that in each area of thought your theories follow “the known research findings”. I have yet to hear of known research findings that support your theory of a 3.8-billion-year computer programme, divine dabbling etc, etc.