cellular intelligence; information controls (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, May 30, 2019, 08:53 (2003 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Again, you miss the point. Cells have the ability to reconfigure chemical reactions to immediate stimuli, but the cells themselves are not changed. What is 50/50 is only applied to the debate about innate intelligence vs intelligent information controlling their immediate actions. It is a pipe dream to assume they can design and manufacture new forms by committee actions.

dhw: Again you miss the point that any innovation has to involve a restructuring of the cell communities that make up every multicellular organism, whether your God did it or not. According to you, the majority of scientists now accept the idea that cells are intelligent.

DAVID: All I have agreed to is all current scientists know is cellular responses to stimuli can be interpreted as intelligent results. No one knows how that is achieved.

Indeed, just as no one knows how speciation is achieved. You have not responded to the point that innovations require restructuring of cell communities, whether God did it or not. And so we are left with the fact that you disagree with those scientists who believe cells are intelligent, and you categorically reject as a pipe dream the hypothesis that this (perhaps God-given) intelligence might possibly extend to innovation.

dhw: I doubt if many scientists would regard it as more of a pipe dream than the hypothesis that an unknown power provided the first cells with a computer programme for every innovation, or alternatively popped in to perform operations on various organisms to prepare them for events over which – in your latest hypothesis concerning local environmental changes – he had no control.

DAVID: No one knows how life got a start. We all have our own hypotheses.
Indeed, and no one knows how speciation happens, but any hypothesis other than your own is apparently a pipe dream.

DAVID: As an agnostic you may want to skip over God's role, but I consider Him as an answer to the unanswered questions.

dhw: The question we are dealing with here is speciation. “God” is not an answer if you propose that your God preprogrammed or dabbled it all, and I propose that your God designed an autonomous mechanism. You repeatedly try to make out that my agnosticism invalidates any criticism of your highly subjective view of your God’s purposes and methods. Sorry, but that is a total cop-out.

DAVID: Of course God is an answer just as you describe my thoughts. I agree that God might have designed a semi-autonomous design mechanism, but you view God as wishy-washy in control of evolution, and i view Him in firm control.

Semi-autonomous is meaningless. Either he did or he didn’t preprogramme or dabble every design. There is nothing “wishy-washy” about a God who decides to create an autonomous mechanism that takes its own decisions – or are you now telling us that your God is wishy-washy because he gave humans free will? Your “firm control” contradicts your belief that the only thing he wanted to design was H. sapiens, but for some unknown reason he proceeded to design 3.5+ billion years’ worth of non-human life forms. Furthermore, you have recently decided that he did NOT control local environmental changes, which means he did not control the very thing which his innovations were designed in advance to cope with! A weird kind of "firm control".