Bacterial Intelligence? self ID virus that kills enemies (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 30, 2019, 15:05 (2032 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: There can be no doubt that a programme for every single undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder will be mind-bogglingly complex, and all you are saying now is that this mind-bogglingly complex programme will be discovered in the future.

DAVID: And my point is that degree of complexity will require an acceptance that God did it.

dhw: That is the design argument for the existence of God, which I accept as perfectly logical. It is your championship of a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for all undabbled evolutionary innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders that is in dispute.

I've admitted my speculations as to how God produced or guided evolution are just that, speculations. I can think of no other processes than massive pre-programming for which there is much evidence, intermittent dabbling (no evidence) or constant dabbling (no evidence). Your proposed inventive mechanism used by organisms to speciate (no evidence) I accept only with guidelines from God, whom I consider wholly in charge of any advances.

dhw: But you admit that you do not actually believe in this undiscovered programme. Good. That leaves open the possibility that your God might have used a different method from programming and dabbling, and the only one you and I can think of – apart from randomness, which we both reject – is autonomous cellular intelligence. (But NOT with instructions or guidelines, because these once again could only come through the computer programme or dabbling.)

Cellular intelligence is your totally unproven conjecture. You have every right to it. I try to base every theory on the scientific facts we have uncovered.

DAVID: I've expressed my view of the original genome above as related to the start of life. The genome contains enormous amounts of intelligent information to exert control over life's processes.

dhw: According to you it contains ALL the instructions for ALL processes except those that your God personally dabbled. I’m not surprised that you don’t actually believe it.

DAVID: Distorting what I have stated again: God is in charge, created a massively complex genome in all its various layers of control to create all of the evolutionary processes. Precise knowledge of how God exerted controls is unknown but I have presented obvious possibilities.

dhw: This is excellent news. If God exists, obviously he is in charge, in the sense that he would have chosen the method to suit his purpose. A massively complex genome with all its layers of control to create all of the evolutionary processes would be just as apt a description of cellular intelligence as of a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for all undabbled changes. Since you do not believe in the computer programme hypothesis, your new description seems to suggest that you are now open to my alternative.

Your alternative is pure speculation. I start with what science shows us as established.