Biological complexity: managing cellular oxygen levels (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 14, 2019, 13:04 (1648 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID (under “IMMUNITY SYSTEM COMPLEXITY”): Once an infection is defeated there must be a memory for the next time that same infection is attempted.

dhw: But it doesn’t occur to you that precisely the same argument applies to every innovation, strategy, lifestyle,and natural wonder. As soon as something is successful, “there must be a memory for the next time”.

DAVID: Apples and oranges. The T cells are programmed to develop a memory. the insects in your view an foretell the future. totally illogical.

dhw: Cells have memory. I don’t know why you insert the word programmed. So do insects. I keep emphasizing that they do NOT foretell the future. They respond, just like bacteria and just like our fellow animals, to PRESENT conditions, and whatever they have learned is passed on through memory to enable them to take precautions against or to counter the same dangers or to solve the same problems.

DAVID: Unless the insect parents watch the larvae until adulthood, they cannot know what might happen to them.

I do not pretend to know how every single survival strategy originated! But even if I accepted your belief that your God (whose sole purpose was apparently to design H. sapiens) watched over the larvae and dabbled this strategy into them, it would still have had to be handed down through memory to all subsequent generations, unless you think he sits there year after year doing the same old dabble! And the same applies if (just as incredibly) 3.8 billion years ago he provided the first living cells with a programme for this particular strategy to switch itself on when the first larvae of this particular species found themselves in trouble. There would still have had to be cellular memory to pass it on.
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DAVID: You have accepted as a theist the possibility of God dabbling.

Yes, for instance by chucking Chixculub at the dinosaurs. I do not see him either dabbling or preprogramming every single strategy, innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life.

dhw: “Imagining the future” is your phrase, not mine. I wrote: “Do you honestly believe that organisms are not aware of dangers and do not learn from experience and do not take precautions”? These are manifestations of consciousness, and we know they are capable of solving new problems as and when they arise.

You have still not commented on this important issue.

dhw: So 3.8 thousand million years ago, your God preprogrammed every solution to every problem that would ever be faced by every cell and every insect (except when he “steps in and helps”) – and all because he had to cover the time he’d decided to wait before he preprogrammed or dabbled the beginnings of human evolution, which was the only thing he actually wanted to do in the first place!

DAVID: Same problem: I don't know why God chose to evolve humans, but He did as history shows.

Dealt with under “David’s theory of evolution”. Please stop leaving out the incongruities which – as you readily admit – demand the abandonment of all human reason. It’s boring for both of us if you keep making me repeat them!