Immunity: Gamma Delta T cells hunt with precision (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, November 24, 2018, 12:18 (2192 days ago) @ David Turell

If anyone is still interested in this discussion, please reread my post from yesterday, which answers all the points David has raised below. I’ll try to keep today’s answers shorter.

DAVID: What you have again ignored is the obvious requirement for complex design to make the required changes. We know organisms can initiate their own minor adaptations.

From yesterday, referring back to the day before: Again you have ignored what I bolded last time: I have always accepted that my hypothesis, like your own, is unproven: nobody knows the extent to which adaptation to new conditions may lead to the major, more complex changes required for speciation. That is why, like your own, my hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
Yes, the changes require complex design, and nobody knows how this takes place. We only have unproven hypotheses, including yours and mine.

DAVID: The fossil gaps in the records support only punctuated equilibrium with major advances which require design. Logically only a mind can design to that required degree.

You know that I accept punctuated equilibrium and the need for design. You have no evidence that “logically only a mind can do the designing” if by “a mind” you mean your God. Look at your many ant articles. “Logically” – I’ll keep my theist hat on – it is perfectly possible that your God designed the mechanisms that enable ants and all other organisms to do their own designing, whether external or internal.

DAVID: Your stretched hypothesis that somehow minor adaptations can reach major adaptations has no evidence of support…

Which is why it remains an unproven hypothesis, just like your own hypothesis that your God designed every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct in advance of changing conditions and as stepping stones to humans.

DAVID: What you describe is a hypothesis which has little likelihood of being correct, based on existing evidence.

Based on your personal judgement and your fixed belief in a hypothesis for which likewise there is no existing evidence.

Under “The newly found bacterial role”:
QUOTE: "Proponents of this hologenomic concept of evolution argue that if there is a fidelity across generations between hosts and microbes, then the holobiont embodies a coming together of numerous, disparate evolutionary lineages into a singular being, a coalition of many that contributes to the functional integrity of the whole.” (dhw’s bold)

DAVID: […] They create immediate adaptations, for example, in digestion, but it is certainly obvious they do not design giant changes.

The section I have bolded seems to emphasize the process of emergence, whereby the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (See also my post concerning ants and corvids). This essentially is the basis of my proposal that cells pool their intelligence, but I had never thought of bacteria as members of the same team. It makes perfect sense, though. As to whether these teams are or are not capable of designing giant changes, that is the hypothesis you refuse to consider, but to my mind it is certainly not “certainly obvious” that such “coalitions” cannot design giant changes as well as minor adaptations.