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

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 07, 2016, 18:36 (2908 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Wednesday, December 07, 2016, 18:44

dhw: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.

This is the nubbin of our difference in thought. There is no evidence for the Darwin thesis that there is a competition with other species or with environmental conditions. Extinctions are just that. The species cannot adapt, but with minor changes then can adapt. But that does not mean it is a road to new species. Oxygen may have allowed the Cambrian explosion, but didn't demand the appearance of those very complex animals out of nothing that lived prweviously. Punc Eq requires that species are isolated and in isolation decide to change, nothing more. It is thin specious thinking, an excuse for change that doesn't hold water.

dhw: 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

Yes it is a possibility, but large changes, as in speciation require complex planning for the changes to occur in a coordinated fashion

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.

dhw: 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.

Very logical to have land animals just become aquatic instead of migrating as most animals do all the time to follow the food. Just involving the huge requirements for physiological changes to become aquatic defies logic. Why did God allow it? He created a evolutionary plan with a drive for complexity.

dhw: 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.

That is your conflation. Humans are the current complex endpoint of evolution, but life is made up of many evolutionary branches of a balance of nature in evolution so life has energy to proceed. Whales are one branch in their own niche as top predators.

dhw: 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. ... Once more: NOBODY knows how speciation took place, and NOBODY knows how intelligent cells/cell communities are.

It is obvious that the gaps in complexity require intense planning, and cell communities in human bodes are very intelligent in what they do automatically, no more.

dhw> We judge intelligence by watching behaviour, not by watching molecules.

If those molecules automatically follow intelligent interaction it can all be planned activity.

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.

dhw: 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.

It is not separate. Initial intelligent information started life and conducted the process of evolution. All one plan. Origin of life and origin of species is all one and the same mechanism. Solves the gap problem. I am allowed to leap to my theories, just as you are. I've never said the 3.8 billion year program is scientifically proven. What we know strongly suggests it.