An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, July 29, 2018, 10:15 (2308 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DAVID: Not circular. All you are proposing is a robotic form of producing something new. Robots can replace humans for specific functions, but not multiple new functions beyond the original. That requires not only foresight and planning, but the original program would have to be a placement of the information in God's mind in the genome of each organism.

dhw: This is precisely the objection I have to your theory that your God provided the first cells with programmes for every undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life, to be passed down for millions and millions of years, through all the different environments and by all the different cell communities. Every preprogrammed organism according to you is a robot. It simply beggars my belief. On the other hand, what I propose is information in the form of cellular intelligence – precisely the opposite of robotic. We humans invent machines that far exceed our own natural limits. If your God can create a mechanism that enables us to do that, why shouldn’t he have created a mechanism that enables other organisms to do their own inventing, as opposed to them all being robots?

DAVID: Such an inventive mechanism runs by independent organisms has no way to analyze the future needs that an active mind would supply. You are still at the robot stage. We human invent machines better than us because we can envision them. God's program at the beginning of life includes the future vision.

You constantly stress that organisms must forecast the future, whereas I constantly stress that they respond to the present. You like to take whales as an example, and have suggested that your God started fiddling with them before they entered the water. I suggest that they entered the water, and the changes took place as a result of their doing so – creating improvements to enable them to exploit their new environment. Similarly with the Cambrian: I would suggest that organisms responded inventively to oxygenation rather than your God preprogramming them or dabbling with them in anticipation of the new environment. It’s a hypothesis – we have no proof – but I find it a lot more convincing than your theory of a God who preprogrammed the first cells with every undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life.

TONY: I would also like to point out that, despite DHW's continued comparisons, God's dabbling and inventive intelligent cells are not in the same category scientifically. Cellular intelligence is not super-natural, and if it existed we Would see the evidence, not only of its successes, but failures.

Yes indeed, cellular intelligence would be natural, but it allows for the supernatural as its creator. And the evidence of failure is the 90% or more extinction rate of species through life’s history.

TONY: For DHW's hypothesis, we should see observable activity I cells. For dabbling, we should see a set of conditions that confirm design.

Scientists such as Barbara McClintock, Lynn Margulis, Guenther-Albrecht and James A. Shapiro, who have all spent a lifetime observing the activities of cells, have no doubt that they are intelligent. But nobody knows whether this intelligence can extend as far as innovation, because nobody has observed innovation. If anyone had observed any of the hypotheses in action, they would not be hypotheses but facts.