Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by dhw, Sunday, May 28, 2017, 15:36 (2735 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My point remains the same. Alternative pathways have always existed, stronger in some than others due to individual variability. The lucky ones with stronger pathways survive, cleverness not involved. Clear?
dhw: I know you reject cleverness. That leaves you with your 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every alternative pathway in the history of life on earth, and some lucky bacteria will accidentally hit the right switch, while the unlucky rest either don’t have the programme or hit the wrong button. Your only alternative apparently is that God pops in to give instructions to the lucky few. I find it all rather hard to believe.
DAVID: You don't seem to want to believe individual variability or the presence of alternative pathways, all shown by current science. Please re-read my above statement. Accept facts. They explain how bacteria survived since the beginning of life.

I am arguing that individual variability may account for different degrees of intelligence, whereby some bacteria work out the right “pathway” for themselves. Your variability refers to the lucky dip summarized above.

dhw: You wrote, concerning the early spinal changes, that they offered “no immediate environmental advantage, since the change is only a step in a process, but a major complex phenotypic change, allowing eventual bipedalism”. I see no sense in the special creation of something useless, merely as a preparation for something that will be specially designed a few million years later. Nor do I think it would have survived if it had not provided some kind of advantage over the old form. It would make more sense to me if each change were designed (whether by God or by the cell communities themselves) for the sake of improvement at the time.
DAVID: You are back to pure Darwin.

Forget Darwin, and stick to the point. You keep telling us how purposeful your God is, so which makes MORE sense? Your God designing something that has no purpose, but survives until a few million years later he redesigns it, or your God designing something which is useful at the time but which can be improved?

DAVID: This is an addendum to my last thought. You have equated our concepts of the process of the advancement of evolution. You see improvement and I see complexity. They have vastly different imports in the understanding of evolution. The subject arises because of the study of a spinal change which occurred, but the animal retained the same species form and function. It was a minor initial adaptation. A bit of complexity, no real improvement.

What do you mean by no “real” improvement? Even a slight improvement is an improvement.

DAVID: Complexity for complexity's sake does not imply that improvement has to take place. Obviously, in general, complexity will result in improvement, but not necessarily. My problem with the whale series is a case in point. I see it as an enormous physiological and phenotypical complexity inducing branch of evolution for no obvious good reason.

I join you in seeing no good reason why your God would specially design the changes, and take so long to perfect them, especially when all he wanted to do was produce humans. An obvious good reason for the changes might be that there was more food in the water than on the land, and so pre-whales adapted to life in the water, improving their adaptations stage by stage. But for some reason, you won't even consider that.

DAVID: On the other hand I see the current end of evolution resulting in the most complex invention of all from evolution, the human brain. Viewed this way, as evolution driven by a complexification drive, makes the whole of evolution understandably logical. The whales are simply a complexification branch of the bush gone wild. Improvement not always needed.

This is a very promising line of thought. There is, of course, no logic to the argument that your God’s aim was to produce the human brain and so evolution went wild and resulted in billions of purposeless complexifications. But you have reiterated over and over again that your God is in charge, in which case how could evolution run wild unless he WANTED it to run wild? Hence the higgledy-piggledy bush as organisms did their own thing, as opposed to his specially designing every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder. We are making remarkable progress.

DAVID: Improvement harks back to Darwin's concept of competition for survival.

No it doesn’t, and I do wish you would stick to my arguments instead of launching off into yet another attack on Darwin. I have always used the twin concepts of survival and improvement as driving forces, and neither of them depends on competition, though of course it may be one factor. Cooperation is an equally powerful one. I see no reason to assume that our friend the pre-whale was forced into the water because other animals were eating all its food (= competition). It’s just as feasible that the land became flooded (= need to survive), or there was a lot more food in the water than on the land and who cares about other animals – plenty of tasty morsels out there, so let’s go get ‘em (= opportunity for improvement).