Natures wonders: ant rafts and towers (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, July 24, 2017, 13:14 (2677 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Intelligent design of intelligent creatures of with varying degrees of intelligence. I do not see these as mutually exclusive.

Nor do I. I keep repeating that we do not know the source of (hypothetical) cellular intelligence, but your God is one possibility.

TONY: Though, they all kind of blow random chance right out of the water.

They blow chance out of the window as the driving force behind evolution, but the problem is the original source of the intelligence. Other possible sources I have mentioned are indeed random chance and some form of panpsychism (see “Understanding the ribosome”). I find all three hypotheses equally difficult to believe in.

TONY: However, with all the intelligence DHW continually talks about, where are the more complex signs of intelligence. I don't mean climbing up your buddies back not to drown, or floating while linked up(which is what sea survival training teaches you to do). Where are the signs of higher intelligence? If cells are intelligent, and that intelligence grows when in a community (multicellular life) why are humans they only creatures that exhibit our degree of intelligence? Surely brain mass alone can not account for it, and neither can size, as ants lack both and perform some impressive feats. Where is expression that we should be seeing in larger life forms if DHW's theory of cellular intelligence is correct?

I don’t understand your final question, unless you are asking why all life forms haven’t evolved into highly intelligent humans, to which the answer is below. Your comment on brain mass and size ties in with our discussion on dualism versus materialism. If materialism is wrong, then organisms must have some kind of “soul” that is in charge, and you then need a material mechanism to enable the soul to direct the physical being - a brain (or in single cells the equivalent of a brain). Materialism argues that the brain or the brain equivalent generates the intelligence. Why different degrees? Why so many different species? Why do some cope with environmental change while others become extinct? Why didn’t all cell communities become humans? The pattern seems to be that cell communities (organisms) work out their own paths to survival and/or improvement. If the path is successful, the organism or improvement survives. New conditions then provide a new threat or a new opportunity for improvement, and so the cycle goes on. Highly intelligent humans are one product of this long history of survival/improvement, as are dogs with their heightened sense of smell, fish with their ability to live in water, birds with their ability to fly, ants with their ability to build rafts, towers and cities. According to my hypothesis, they are all the result of different cell communities working out their own paths, through different degrees and also different forms of intelligence. An ant thinks like an ant and not like an eagle or a human, though all are composed of cell communities that have taken on different forms. This idea does not in any way exclude the existence of your God as the source of cellular intelligence, just as Darwin’s theory allows for the existence of God as the inventor of the whole process of evolution.