Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 28, 2017, 18:54 (2735 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

You at claiming that bacteria invented these pathways we see along the way. They survived 3.8 billion years ago on a chaotic Earth. Did they invent them then with an already intelligent ability? Not without God's help.

dhw: 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?

Covered below:

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.

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

Real speciation. 'Minor initial adaptation' implies only that. No obvious major advance. Improvement is not as important as complexity.

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.

dhw: 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.

Your just-so story ignores the required huge changes. Not worth the trouble.

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.

dhw: 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.

dhw; 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.

Your just-so stories smell of Darwin, I'm sorry to say. I'm attacking your improvement theory. I've always thought complexity was more important. It's in my first book.