Innovation and Speciation: earliest fully a whale (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, June 02, 2019, 13:46 (2000 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Anyone who believes in God will believe that he is in charge, but being in charge does not mean creating only automatons! You already have him not controlling local environmental changes, and giving humans free will. Being in charge means creating what he wanted to create, and if he wanted to create intelligent cells à la Shapiro, then what grounds have you for saying that only your interpretation of his wishes is correct?

DAVID: The cells run intelligently (a human interpretation of how they react to stimuli and produce proteins) due to the instructive information they contain. Protein molecules transmit their fixed functional ability by being in special shapes. Cells do not think.

As usual you present your opinion as if it were a fact, thus resolutely ignoring even your own acknowledgement that you have a 50/50 chance of being wrong and are in a scientific minority.

QUOTE (from “Bacterial version of IM”): "Stress-induced mutation mechanisms, first discovered in bacteria, challenge historical assumptions about the constancy and uniformity of mutation. Mutation is still viewed as probabilistic, not deterministic, but we argue that regulated mutagenesis mechanisms greatly increase the probability that the useful mutations will occur at the right time, thus increasing an organism’s ability to evolve and, possibly, in the right places. Assumptions about the constant, gradual, clock-like, and environmentally blind nature of mutation are ready for retirement. " (DAVID’s bold)

No disagreement here. It has become increasingly obvious that mutations are the response of both microorganisms and multicellular organisms to the demands (or possibly also opportunities) created by changing environmental conditions. Many scientists believe that these bacterial mutations stem from the intelligence of bacteria, but I know of one scientist who thinks his God specially dabbled or preprogrammed every single one of them 3.8 billion years ago.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: Why do you insist that the invention of an autonomous mechanism is a sign of weakness? If he WANTED an unpredictable variety of species that would come and go, then clearly he got what he wanted. And I have no objection to the idea that he wanted humans. I simply object to the incongruous combination of ideas that 1) humans were the ONLY thing he wanted, but 2) he specially designed everything else, even though 3) he also specially designed the ONLY thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: You just don't like the concept that God evolves everything He wants. But it is the history we know.

If God exists, and since I believe in evolution, then of course he used evolution to get everything he wanted. As on the whale thread, what I don’t like is the 1), 2), 3) listed above and which you have ignored so that your vague generalisation will cover up all the incongruities.