Innovation and Speciation: earliest fully a whale (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, May 31, 2019, 15:13 (2002 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Sure I skipped over your belief design is not required in advance, but that cells invent new forms on the fly. Not possible, so I've discounted it.

dhw: I’d be interested to know what Shapiro, with his belief in cellular intelligence and his concept of “natural genetic engineering”, would make of your certainty, and what other scientists – believers and non-believers – would make of your fixed belief that your God specially designed all innovations, lifestyles, natural wonders and econiches in anticipation of changing conditions over some of which (local) he had no control, and that every life form was specially designed for the sole purpose of eating or being eaten until he specially designed H. sapiens.

DAVID: What my faith in God causes me to believe has nothing to do with Shapiro's research which I accept also. What strains my credulity is your extrapolation taking what individual cells do constantly in an intelligent fashion moment by moment to then assigned them the ability to speciate new complexly designed more advanced organisms. It is a feat of great imagination.

Shapiro’s “natural genetic engineering” is based on precisely that idea.
Natural genetic engineering - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_genetic_engineering

"Within the context of the article in particular and Shapiro's work on Natural Genetic Engineering in general, the "guiding intelligence" is to be found within the cell. (For example, in a Huffington Post essay entitled Cell Cognition and Cell Decision-Making[12] Shapiro defines cognitive actions as those that are "knowledge-based and involve decisions appropriate to acquired information," arguing that cells meet this criteria.)"

dhw: You constantly ignore my acknowledgement that this is a hypothesis, not a fact, and you absolutely refuse to acknowledge that an undiscovered 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every single undabbled innovation, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder installed in the very first cells by an unknown and sourceless intelligence is also a hypothesis and a “feat of great imagination”. It is not your faith in God that has caused you to believe this but your faith in your highly subjective interpretation of your God’s purposes and methods.

It is the only set of interpretations possible given since I accept that God is in charge. I am not sourceless through my beliefs. Your only alternation to my thoughts is that you want to weaken God by having Him give an autonomous mechanism for speciation, when you try on theistic theories. I won't accept that so-called theistic thinking from you.