Junk DNA goodbye!: neutral DNA is shown as smaller (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 30, 2018, 08:46 (2217 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I am editing comments in order to keep the arguments more focused.

DHW: Biological cooperation is central to my whole hypothesis.

TONY: I do not think that co-dependency and cooperation are the same thing. […]

Agreed. Co-dependency is Margulis’s theory of symbiosis, but that still requires cooperation. The body is a mass of symbiotic relationships requiring cooperation between the different cell communities.

Dhw: […] you have raised a crucial point with your “chaotic nature of life and the random nature of misfortune”. […] it raises the whole question of the extent to which his God remains in control of events and environmental changes. I don’t know your views on this. Was Chixculub, for instance, due to random chance, or do you think your God threw it at the dinosaurs?

TONY: […] God does not profess to assert control. It is also important to understand that the lack of assertion does not preclude the ability to assert control.

With my theist’s hat on, I’m happy with this. Your God’s renunciation of control would explain the higgledy-piggledy history of evolution, with its unpredictability adding interest to the spectacle. (This may irritate you, but it fits in with your views on control.)

TONY: As best I can reason, the idea is that chaotic events provoke opportunities to grow.

This again fits in with the hypothesis that your God enjoys seeing change, which would include growth,

TONY: This is not saying that such chaos is unavoidable, or that it can not be mitigated, but rather that it is absolutely necessary for life to exist and thrive. Without it we would be weak, lazy, complacent, ignorant, and frail.

I don’t understand why you are confining your comments to humans. My questions concern the whole history of life.

TONY: I have no way of knowing, nor does anyone else, whether or not Chixculub was God directed or not. Either is possible, and both sides of the argument have their merits. Yet, I can say with some degree of certainty that if Chiculub had not happened something else would have. […]

Agreed. The history of life is one of change, and your account seems to suggest your God let it run its own course rather than preprogramming or dabbling every change for the sake of the human brain, as proposed by David.

TONY: All of the mad scrambling to recover from one fire after another about evolutionary theory should clue them in, but they […] become blind to the evidence in front of their eyes.

DHW: How many fires are you talking about in relation to evolutionary theory, i.e. the theory that all life is descended from a few forms or one? ... To be blind to evidence means the evidence is there, so (let me put on my atheist’s hat) please tell us what evidence there is for a sourceless supermind which produces species out of thin air.

TONY: To the first question: the fossil record, the genetic record, the complexity issue, the information origin issue, the abiogenesis issue, the speciation issue, the invention before selection issue, the co-dependency issue, the evolution of sex issue, the inter-species co-evolvement issue, etc. Pick one. The answer to the second question is in the answers to the first.

I’m sorry, but firstly the fact that there are issues over origins (which are not the subject of the theory) and over the means by which evolution progresses, does not disprove the theory that all life descended from one or a few forms. Even you have agreed that these were single cells. However, even more to the point, not one of these issues provides a shred of evidence that there is a sourceless supermind which produces species out of thin air. Issues are issues, not evidence!

DHW: …why would you be sad or angry at the suggestion that your God may have created a mechanism which enabled living organisms to diversify autonomously from the original few forms or one?

TONY: [..] in all honesty the panpsychism answer does irritate me because the evidence for it is only overwhelming in that it is underwhelming. We have no evidence for panpsychism that can not be explained better by a more programmatic approach.

This does not answer the above question. However, most forms of panpsychism (including David’s panentheism, which includes programmes for just about everything that wasn’t dabbled)) revolve around your God. I have suggested an atheistic form, and although you will reject it, I don’t know why you regard a bottom-up evolution of complexity and consciousness as a poorer explanation than a top-down one that has a supreme but sourceless consciousness creating a programme for consciousness.

TONY: However, there is also the case that could be made that the very stability of species over large scales of time is indicative of many things, but Darwinian evolution and panpsychism are not among them.

Of course they are among them. Evolution proceeds in bursts (see Gould’s punctuated equilibrium). Darwinian evolution does not discount there being long periods of environmental stasis leading to long periods of stable species. Panpsychism endows all things with some form of mental ability. Why do you think it impossible for organisms to have mental abilities just because their species is stable for a long time?