Natures wonders: ants farm fungus for food (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 18, 2017, 09:25 (2774 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:I thought you were referring to brains in general, because you believe that only brainy organisms are intelligent whereas brainless organisms have been preprogrammed.
DAVID: Brainy organisms are intelligent to some degree. Bacteria are automatically controlled by their genomes.

We’d better forget your statement about God’s brain being able to design anything a bacterium can come up with, even though he hasn’t got a brain. We are left with your usual authoritative statement about bacteria, with your absolute refusal to consider the possibility that bacteria’s intelligent behaviour might just possibly be the result of bacteria’s intelligence.

DAVID: The mechanisms given them for automatic adaptation and the simplicity of their lifestyles make bacteria adapt to extreme conditions. Butterflies are too fragile to do that.

Why do you insist on inserting “automatic”? It is blindingly obvious that bacteria possess the mechanisms to enable them to adapt to extreme conditions, since we know they adapt to extreme conditions. That does not mean their adaptation is automatic, especially since researchers have noted that when exposed to certain tests, some bacteria die before the others come up with a solution. And of course butterflies are too fragile to withstand extreme conditions. They are even too fragile to withstand what we would regard as non-extreme conditions, which is why they have come up with the solution of migration. If they hadn’t, they would have died out. None of this proves that God makes all the decisions for bacteria and butterflies.

DAVID: Either a jumping spider can plot its leap trajectory from the beginning of its life or it doesn't eat. This is design at its finest.
dhw: Two possible answers: firstly, I don’t think it’s impossible for the spider to have caught its prey by other means before it perfected its jumping techniques. Secondly, as organisms can sometimes change their own structure very rapidly in order to adapt, I don’t think it’s impossible for them to do the same in order to innovate, using their possibly God-given intelligence.
DAVID: Yes they might have had simplistic techniques for hunting early on. Did they rapidly add so many eyes, and train their brain in calculus to make their jumps accurate? Very unlikely. Saltation is a better concept.

I don’t know, and nor do you, but I’d have thought the rapid perfection of a new variation is more likely than immediate perfection. The guppy experiment showed that evolutionary change can take place rapidly over just a few generations.

DAVID: Free will involves brains that can plan. You are stretching that to include planning an evolution in phenotype! Not at all likely.

I know you consider that unlikely. Personally, I consider it more likely than your God directly designing – or providing the very first cells with programmes for – every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder, including every decision taken by every bacterium, in the history of life on Earth. I offered free will as an example of your God deliberately sacrificing control, just as he might have done in setting up autonomous mechanisms for evolution (leaving himself the option of a dabble).