Genome complexity: new review of epigenetics studies (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 10, 2017, 18:38 (2753 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: [Intelligent response] is crystal clear when we actually observe organisms changing their structure in order to adapt. No planning – simply a direct response.
DAVID: Structural changes require coordinated planning. You show none.

dhw: I am contrasting structural with behavioural adaptation, i.e. changes in the anatomy enabling resistance to toxins, camouflage, longer or different coloured fur. And it is your “planning” that I am questioning. These changes require intelligent coordination between the cell communities, and they occur as a RESPONSE to changes in the environment.

Resistance to toxins is epigenetic using alternative pathways that are available. Camouflage in butterflies is structural as probably is change in fur color. Require planning.

dhw Extend the principle to lifestyle: the climate becomes a threat to the organism, and so the only solution is migration.
DAVID: Migration is not evolutionary phenotypic change, which is my point.

dhw: But you don’t confine your God’s planning to phenotypes – you insist that only he could have planned the monarch’s migration and designed the weaverbird’s nest, all for the sake of humans. It is the whole package put together that is so illogical. Or are you now backtracking on lifestyles and natural wonders?

You are correct, migration requires planning. I was referring to body type changes in speciation. Your cell committees are incapable of future planning to accomplish species change.

dhw: Extend it to speciation: an aquatic organism discovers an abundance of food on land, and its body adapts to the new opportunities, with fins in due course becoming legs etc.
DAVID: Requires mental planning.

dhw: It requires intelligent (= mental) and physical cooperation between cell communities to coordinate their response. Planning requires prior knowledge. In my hypothetical example, you therefore seem to be suggesting that your God gave the fish animal legs and lungs, then put lots of food onto dry land and told the fish to leave the water. And presumably he designed the monarch’s metamorphoses and navigational apparatus before changing the climate and forcing the butterfly to emigrate (in order to keep life going before he designed the only thing he wanted to design – homo sapiens).

Perfectly acceptable scenario.

dhw: I am pointing out that communities can produce greater intelligence than individuals.

True.

DAVID: 'Responding to' like the guppies is not planning. Large or small is not body type change. You keep avoiding the problem I present.

dhw: We don’t know how the major body changes of speciation occur, but minor adaptations give us a possible clue. I find it difficult to accept the idea that evolution depends on reversing the known process of adaptation, with your God making all the structural changes before creating all the new local and/or global environments which require or allow such changes, as opposed to new environments triggering the structural changes.

I have made the point that environmental changes never pushed the drive to humans. apes are still apes. Environment is only one of many factors that drive evolution. Darwin used that argument, but his entire theory is weak, as we know.