Dawkins dissed? no, defended by Darwinist authors (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 26, 2018, 12:11 (2250 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If we substitute cell for gene, this is very much along the lines of the hypothesis I have proposed. Every organism is a community of cells which cooperate to form every multicellular organism that has ever existed. The point that the world is “too big to include genomes”, in our understanding of how life works as it does, is akin to Shapiro’s response to the question why people question cellular intelligence: “Large organisms chauvinism”. And the myriad interactions account for the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush of organisms extant and extinct, including humans. Of course the article does not take account of the astonishing complexity of a mechanism that can achieve this diversity and which a theist would understandably claim requires a designing mind. And it doesn’t specifically claim that genes/cells are intelligent. For some reason, all the emphasis is on selfishness – which is not always conducive to successful cooperation and communal life – but selfish, unselfish, cooperative, communal behaviour are all factors that suggest a degree of conscious intelligence, as maximised in us humans.

DAVID: I appreciate your comment. The article is all fluffy reasoning based on an emphasis on survival. As I have stated survival is only one of the considerations as to how and why evolution works. And there is more than a degree of conscious intelligence in the universe.

Yes, survival is a hugely important factor in the history of evolution, but it has to be coupled with the drive for improvement, which we have already discussed at length. My remark about “degree of consciousness” referred to the cells, which – if my hypothesis is correct – clearly have a lesser degree of conscious intelligence than us humans.