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

by dhw, Sunday, November 25, 2018, 09:10 (2191 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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: Yes, both unproven, but I take it one logical step further: complex designs to cross the gaps in the fossil record require the mentation given by a designing mind. Adaptation produces small steps, nothing more, and these are seen, but nothing more on the way to new species.

Your one step further is to say that only your God can design innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders, including such items as 50,000 different spider webs, different stages of whale, and the weaverbird’s nest. My theistic proposal is that your God may have designed the mechanism that enables organisms to do their own designing, but I keep agreeing that there is no proof that this mechanism may be responsible for major changes.

DAVID: I've agreed that is possible, but all it does is keep God in control if he mechanisms have guidelines.

Why the if clause with "guidelines"? My theistic proposal is that he did not WANT to keep control, which is why he allowed his mechanism to do its own autonomous designing. Much more interesting than watching billions of automatons do exactly what you want them to do.

QUOTE: "[…] 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.

dhw: The section I have bolded seems to emphasize the process of emergence, whereby the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. […] 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. (I have retrospectively changed my own wording here, as what I wrote originally meant the opposite of what I intended! My apologies.)

DAVID: My objection, as always, is that it takes mental planning to create advanced designs as required by the gaps in the fossil record.

Gaps in the fossil record may be the result of saltations, but in any case they do not require your God to have designed every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in advance of the changing conditions in which each new organism lives. My proposal is that as conditions change, organisms RESPOND to them by using their possibly God-given intelligence. Intelligence is “mental”, but it is not confined to self-awareness or the ability to plan for the future.

Under “microbiome of coral”:
DAVID: Bacteria and other organisms are everywhere and obviously play a role in evolution as microbiomes:
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-corals-microbiomes-evolved.html

The term “phylosymbiosis” sent me scurrying back to Lynn Margulis, who pioneered the whole idea that symbiosis and cooperation were every bit as crucial to evolution as competition. I found this in a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis

“…her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence.” The pattern of symbiosis and cooperation becomes clearer and clearer with all these examples, for which many thanks. Incidentally, Margulis was one of “my” scientists who believed in cellular intelligence.