Natures wonders: plant and fungus in symbiosis (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, April 22, 2017, 11:15 (2770 days ago) @ David Turell

David’s comment: this type of nutritional inter relational is not uncommon, but the lipid transfer is very unusual, and the method of membrane transfer is not yet known. One must wonder how it all began. Probably as a 'friendly' invasion by the fungus, not as a harmful infection, with epigenetic adaptations that followed. Until the complexity of the methods are known, necessity for design help is unclear. My point is complexity requires design, simple adaptions do not.

When you say “design”, I presume you mean one of your two methods: God preprogramming or God dabbling. I would argue that even the simplest adaptation requires intelligent interaction – both partners must “know” what is good for them and act accordingly. If you think your God gave fungi the ability to design “simple adaptations” for themselves, I see no reason why you should not extend the same concession to bacteria. I would also be very hesitant to draw solid lines between simple epigenetic adaptations, complex epigenetic adaptations and complex epigenetic innovations. Different organisms have different degrees of consciousness/ intelligence, but of course no-one has ever witnessed any full-blown evolutionary innovation. The autonomous IM is simply a hypothesis based on mechanisms we know must exist, as proven over and over again by these marvellous natural wonders.Thank you again for drawing our attention to them.

From the article on “whales”:
QUOTE: "With this new fossil find, however, dating to 49 million years ago (bear in mind that Pakicetus lived around 53 million years ago), this means that the first fully aquatic whales now date to around the time when walking whales (Ambulocetus) first appear. This substantially reduces the window of time in which the Darwinian mechanism has to accomplish truly radical engineering innovations and genetic rewiring to perhaps just five million years — or perhaps even less."

David’s comment: The planning required for these changes is very complex and requires intricate and complicated coordination for it all to work. Only God's mind can do it in the known time frame.

Nobody knows how innovation occurs or how long it would take an intelligent organism to redesign itself. Five million years hardly represents a saltation. If we allow ten years for each generation, we have 500,000 generations of pre-whales to design these innovations. Please tell me on what authority anyone can state that 500,000 generations of intelligent organisms are not enough to design the engineering and do the rewiring.