Biological complexity: feedback loops are vital (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, September 21, 2019, 10:10 (1891 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Without precise controls of chemical levels, life cannot survive. There are chemical cycles which produce necessary outputs and there are feedback controls which are also loops and control outputs when too low or too high. They are fully automatic and have to be:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/math-reveals-the-secrets-of-cells-feedback-circuitry-201...

DAVID: Without these control loops, homeostasis in life is impossible, as is life itself. This research supports my contention that most bacterial and cellular responses are automatic or tightly controlled. So much for free-thinking and free-acting bacteria or cells.

dhw: Of course life would be impossible without homeostasis, and of course most bacterial and cellular responses are automatic and tightly controlled, just as most of our own responses are automatic and tightly controlled. If they weren’t, we too would drop dead any second. The key word in your comment is “most”. Cellular intelligence manifests itself in the responses that are not automatic! Those scientists who support the concept have observed bacteria solving new problems. Yes, the solutions always involve chemical processes – in us as in them – but the information demanding new actions has to be processed first, and then decisions have to be taken in order to change the existing structure/behaviour of the cell(s)/bacteria.

DAVID: My 'most' is not your most. Please describe the new problems bacteria solve. I don't see any but I do see epigenetic alterations of their DNA for very minor adaptations. And where did the information bacteria use come from? They didn't think it up on their own.

The proposal is that bacteria process information from their environment, presumably with what would be their equivalent of a brain. I don’t have time to research all the experiments and observations made by McClintock, Margulis, James Shapiro, Albrecht Bühler or all the other scientists who support the theory that bacteria are intelligent, but earlier you admitted that they are in a majority.

dhw: You have always agreed that the decision-making process shows intelligence, but you attribute that to your God’s preprogramming, though allowing for a 50/50 chance that “my” scientists might be right. Please stop pretending that automatic chemical responses in bacteria prove they are not intelligent and have been preprogrammed by your God. But thank you for your all-important “most”. It’s the rest that demonstrate intelligence.

DAVID: You persist is misinterpreting my 50/50 as it simply describes the possibilities for the existence of information. Either it was implanted in the beginning or bacteria developed it on their own. I totally reject the latter possibility as you well know. Bacteria cannot and do not think, much as you want them to, as a way of avoiding God.

Yes, you totally reject the autonomously intelligent 50, although many scientists accept it, and for the hundredth time, this is NOT a way of avoiding God, because in hundreds of posts I keep reiterating that your God may be the inventor of cellular intelligence.But it is certainly a way of avoiding a particular theory about God's motives and methods which we humans, yourself included, find illogical.