Biological complexity: managing cellular oxygen levels (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 25, 2019, 11:05 (1639 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I realize that you fully believe your God preprogrammed the weaverbird’s nest 3.8 billion years ago, or popped in to give the bird a course in knot-tying, and that this was an indispensable factor in his preparations for the design of H. sapiens, which was his one and only purpose. I remain sceptical.

DAVID: Of course you do.

I’m glad you acknowledge that my scepticism is only natural!

DAVID: (under “Ant intelligence”): Human traffic jams are the result of individual driver's decisions. The ants make group decisions as each individual makes the same move in coordination. I suspect a learned instinctual behavior based on standardized individual responses to stimuli, as shown in the bridge building study.

dhw: I’m glad you use the word “learned”, as opposed to preprogrammed or dabbled. How do you think the strategy first arose, and how do you think subsequent generations learned it? Don’t you think this is a prime example of the bolded statement with which I have begun this post?

DAVID: But it is based on expecting rote behavior by programmed ants, as previously shown.

dhw: You have never shown that the first ants to solve problems of traffic jams and gaps to be bridged were preprogrammed to do so 3.8 billion years ago in the first cells. Once a problem has been solved, the solution will be passed on, but it takes intelligence to solve the problem in the first place.

DAVID: The finding in bridges was that each ant was programmed to do his own individual standardized response. Intelligence involves conceptualizing a solution. In this case according to the article:
"What they saw surprised them: when density increases, ant flows (1) swell and then become constant, whereas human traffic, above a certain density threshold, slows to zero flow and causes a jam (2). Ants, on the other hand, accelerate until a maximum flow or capacity on the path is reached. When traffic becomes too dense and causes too many collisions between ants, they change tactics, preferring to avoid time-consuming collisions instead of continuing to accelerate. Similarly, researchers noted that at excessively high density levels, ants refrain from joining the flow of traffic and wait for it to thin out instead."

Where do you see preprogramming? Every sentence tells us what they do and how they adapt to changing circumstances: they accelerate, they change tactics, they refrain and wait...Do you honestly think all this was preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago? Clearly they think on their feet!

DAVID: Individual ants work in unison as programmed, while humans act individually. No conceptualization required.

Why “as programmed”? Yes, they work in unison – so do humans when the action requires teamwork. And you still refuse to acknowledge that all strategies such as bridge-building must have had an origin which requires an inventive intelligence, and once a solution had been found to a particular problem, it would have been passed down to subsequent generations.