cellular intelligence; information controls (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, May 26, 2019, 10:50 (2006 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw (earlier post under “bacterial intelligence”): So far, bacteria have found means of resisting just about everything that humans and Nature can throw at them. They simply use whatever materials are available to ensure their survival. Isn’t it strange that our highly developed intelligence is still unable to get the better of what some people believe to be unthinking automatons? Maybe they have a different form of intelligence from ours?

DAVID: Just perhaps it is the grand intelligence who first created them and gave them these automatic abilities?

If they are “automatic”, they are not abilities, they are programmes your God assembled from the very beginning to solve every single problem that bacteria would face throughout the rest of life’s history. The unlikelihood of this is compounded by the article dealt with here, especially by your bolded paragraph:

QUOTE: "'The most striking thing is that this circuit is highly flexible, as this cell-wide web can rapidly reconfigure to deliver different outputs in a manner determined by the information received by and relayed from the nucleus. This is something no man-made microprocessors or circuit boards are yet capable of achieving.'"(David's bold)

The comparison between organic intelligence and computers is a commonplace, but as your bold says quite explicitly, the cell’s materials can reconfigure themselves in response to new information in a manner that computers cannot. A perfect image for evolution by autonomous as opposed to preprogrammed activity.

DAVID: This is the kind of process I have assumed we would find with quantum study of cellular activity. This why cells appear to act intelligently. They have been given the information and the networks to do so. They have a marked degree of flexible controls. Your experts who have assumed cells are innately intelligent have not had this new information about how cells operate.

As always, you the self-professed dualist take the physical processes to be the source of the decisions that lead to the “reconfigurations”. Yes, the information is provided physically, and yes the process of reconfiguration is physical, but how the information is processed and how the new decisions are reached remains a mystery. That is where the computer image breaks down, as is all too evident from the above passage.

DAVID: This is well beyond anything a Darwin-style evolution could develop. It requires exquisite design by a master designer. God is required.

Darwin did not deal with the origin of the mechanisms that drive evolution (although in later editions he frequently refers to the Creator). I have always accepted the argument that the complexities of my (still unproven) cellular intelligence may have been designed by your God. That is not the issue here.