cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, 08:36 (2684 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw (under “big brain”): If your God can create cells that seem to be intelligent, I suspect that he can create cells that actually are intelligent. You keep telling us that nobody can possibly judge from the outside...and so we are back to your dogmatic assertions that you just happen to know the truth.

DAVID: If you would study some cellular biology you would see all the automaticity.

dhw: Of course there is automaticity. But according to Shapiro, Margulis, McClintock, Bühler and others there is also intelligence. And they (have) spent a lifetime studying cellular biology.
DAVID: Your usual response. The genome runs the cells intelligently because of the intelligent information implanted.

Your usual response: I must ignore those experts who disagree with you.

dhw: The fact that some cells can change their function and bacteria can modify their own DNA offers increasing support for the idea that cell communities themselves may provide the driving force behind evolutionary change. Their versatility and self-control may be the result of design, but that certainly doesn’t mean that they are automatic. Let me repeat that my hypothesis relates to the origin of innovations. Once these are established, they will function automatically until confronted with new challenges or opportunities.

DAVID: And it is my view that the origin of life is a gift. All of this discussion has to be seamless, although you delight in excluding origin of life. The only reason bacteria can do some adaptions is that they were created to have that ability. They did not develop it on their own.

I have never ignored the origin of life, but neither you nor I nor anyone else knows it, which is why I constantly repeat that cellular intelligence may have been invented by your God. You simply refuse to consider the possibility that a (perhaps God-given) cellular intelligence might exist, because of your “large organisms chauvinism” (Shapiro).