Genome complexity: controlling DNA in the cell (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 08, 2018, 11:41 (2209 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: All biochemical research shows that molecules act robotically in the series of reactions exposed.

dhw: Why have you changed cells/cell communities to molecules? I’m amazed that you think “my” advocates of cellular intelligence, who have spent a lifetime researching the behaviour of cells, have done no research on the behaviour of cells.

DAVID: What do you think your guys study except molecular reactions in cells? That is what biological research is at the intracellular level!

The question does not revolve around molecular reactions but around what DRIVES the molecular reactions! My guys have observed how cells solve problems, and have concluded that the molecular reactions which lead to the solution of the problems are driven by cellular intelligence.

DAVID: Intelligent molecular reactions in cells cannot create evolution All they are doing is performing life's homeostasis. Do any of your folks think cellular intelligence leads to evolution?

If you bear in mind that Shapiro is a strong champion of cellular intelligence, I think his concept of natural genetic engineering suggests precisely that:
www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people/view/james-a-shapiro

QUOTES: "The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable. Our current ideas about evolution have to incorporate this basic fact of life."
(Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, p.2)

quote: “Shapiro integrates advances in symbiogenesis, epigenetics, and saltationism into a unified approach that views evolutionary change as an active cell process, regulated epigenetically and capable of making rapid large changes by horizontal DNA transfer, inter-specific hybridization, whole genome doubling, symbiogenesis, or massive genome restructuring.”

dhw: If your God exists, there is no question that diversity is part of the world he created, and the constantly shifting balance of nature must be linked to constantly changing conditions which in turn lead to diversity. But you are right, he is your God, and you can imagine him doing whatever you want him to do: so yes, he could deliberately have created every single life form, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct in the whole history of life, controlling every action by every organism, and probably controlling every change in conditions as well (since the changing balance of nature depends on changing conditions). How all this fits in with his purpose of creating the brain and body of H. sapiens is a mystery, but God’s logic is different from ours so we shouldn’t try to fit the different parts of the hypothesis together. And we shouldn’t consider a different hypothesis whose parts actually do fit together, because…because…? Well, he is your God and you can imagine him doing...etc.

DAVID: I fully understand where your rump is placed on the picket fence. You admit design is needed to explain the tremendous changes in evolution, but can't explain where the design originated so you invent what to me are preposterous hypotheses based on a monstrous extrapolation of cellular intelligence, when all they are doing is intelligently running life's homeostasis because of how they are designed. Which is why this website exists to help clear up agnostic confusion.

Sorry, but your polemic does not lend any credibility to your own hypothesis, whose illogicality you admit by claiming that your God’s logic must be different from ours. On the other hand, you have agreed that my hypothesis fits in with the history of life as we know it, and since NOBODY knows the origin of speciation, but we do know that cell communities are capable of minor adaptations and of solving problems, the hypothesis that they might also have engineered the innovations we cannot explain can hardly be called “monstrous” or “preposterous”. And for those who believe in or do not disbelieve in God, the hypothesis has the added attraction that it does not in any way exclude his existence as the inventor of the mechanism. It only excludes one particular, illogical interpretation of his motives and methods.