Evolution: poisonous frog self-protection (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 28, 2017, 14:28 (2612 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You have agreed that organisms have an autonomous mechanism for minor adaptations. I am now probing how far you think this mechanism is capable of going. Do you think the frog was capable of developing its own poison and resistance to its own poison, or do you think your God had to preprogramme it all 3.8 billion years ago?

DAVID: Becoming poisonous and being self-protected must have developed simultaneously. Looks designed to me. The alteration of the nervous system afterward might well be an epigenetic adaptation.

I would suggest that all adaptations and innovations have to be designed if they are to function. The question is what does the designing. I understand how very difficult it is for you to draw borderlines, but the question remains whether you think changes of whatever kind have been preprogrammed/dabbled by your God or designed by the cell communities themselves. You have acknowledged autonomous design by cell communities, though you prefer to call it minor or epigenetic adaptation. And in a new post you have given us another fascinating instance of chemical defences, this time by moths, and again you emphasize design:

DAVID’s comment: Unless these moths had these chemicals from the beginning of their species, they would not be here now. I think they were designed to be protected this way.

dhw:So did your God step in specially to design its chemicals, or alternatively did he provide the first living cells with a programme not only for the moth and the frog but also for their chemicals – along with programmes for every other undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder? And were all these really necessary to keep life going so that he could produce the brain of Homo sapiens? Or is it just possible that the now acknowledged capability for autonomous design was in operation for both the frog and the moth?

You keep pushing your idea that God gave organisms the ability to speciate or to create irreducibly complex mechanisms. I have specifically, in both comments above, specified the need for design. And as always it is programmed from the beginning or it is a dabble. The 'capability for autonomous design' is epigenetic adaptation at the level we have discovered.