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

by dhw, Sunday, December 11, 2016, 13:13 (2904 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If an organism can survive in a different environment, that is an improvement over not surviving. Only a drive to survival and/or improvement makes sense.
DAVID: We are discussing whales. Entering a hostile aquatic environment with the requirement of a complex physiological new phenotype to me is an exercise in futility and makes no sense. Yes the animals do survive and are improved in the sense they achieve the ability to survive in water. But they are certainly lots more complex.

Why do you say the aquatic environment was “hostile”? How do you know it was more “hostile” than the land environment they decided to leave, perhaps once conditions had changed? Just as fish may have explored the land as offering new opportunities, pre-whales may have explored the water. “Wow, nice yummy fish here, and so easy to catch…This is the life, boys and girls!” What exactly is your theory? That God preprogrammed/dabbled them to enter the water so that step by step they could become more complex, because although he really wanted to create humans, he needed step-by-step more complex whales in the water to balance nature so that life could go on until humans came? Does that make sense to you?

dhw: We have agreed several times that Nature is “balanced” so long as life goes on, with or without humans. The expression provides no explanation whatsoever for your anthropocentric view of evolution.
DAVID: It explains how everyone ate until humans arrived.

How does that explain why your God had to specially design the great bush of different species, 99% of which disappeared? You have admitted you don’t know (“Why He didn’t just start at the Garden of Eden, I cannot explain”), so why do you pursue this line of argument?

dhw: The complexity of life’s genome layers lends itself perfectly well to the concept of cellular intelligence. And you still haven’t told us the “known research findings” that support your divine preprogramming/dabbling hypothesis.
DAVID: That cellular intelligence is supplied by God at the origin of life.

I thought you didn’t believe in cellular intelligence, so I’m delighted to hear that it is now a known research finding, but I do not know of any known research findings that confirm the existence of God.

DAVID: Planning by an intelligent mind is required by the layers of genome complexity you refer to, which are discoveries by science, of which you are fully aware.

The layers of genome complexity are indeed known research findings. What known research findings tell us these were planned by “an intelligent mind”?

DAVID: All of that leads to my theory of programming. Dabbling is a supposition of mine related to probable course correction in the process of evolution which might drift off course. God uses to evolution as a process to produce humans.

I am aware of your theory, but not of the “known research findings” that support it. All you have come up with here are the layers of genome complexity, which fit in just as well with my cellular intelligence hypothesis as with your preprogramming/dabbling theory.