Biological complexity: managing cellular oxygen levels (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 29, 2019, 10:42 (1853 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If you now understand my marching point, my point, I know I differ from the ant on being automatic, like him marching, but, unlike him, i introspectively understand what I am doing as a result of training.

dhw: We are not talking about introspection, which of course I acknowledge as a major difference between ants and us. We are talking about the origin of ant marching (which, incidentally, is totally different from human marching).

DAVID: I love how you quibble. Have you ever marched? In marching we are all automatons, ants or humans.

So why do you think your God preprogrammed the ant march but intelligent humans worked out the human march?

dhw: You assume that ants did not devise their own way of marching – and, incidentally, of training, since we know that ants teach their fellow ants – but your God preprogrammed it 3.8 billion years ago…

DAVID: Remember in the ant bridge study each ant did its individual role, all ants the same. All automatons

You persist in ignoring the fact that this strategy must have had a beginning. Once it was established, the ants would have known (or been taught) their individual roles.

dhw: You assume that ants did not devise their own way of marching [...] but your God preprogrammed it 3.8 billion years ago or himself popped in to show them the way. I propose that they worked it out for themselves and passed on the instructions, just as someone or the other devised a way of marching to be passed on to your high school and army trainers, and from them to you. Now please explain how you can tell that their march was preprogrammed and yours was not.

DAVID: I was trained, ants were programmed.

And that is the nub of the matter. You keep repeating your fixed belief as if it were a fact. So 3.8 billion years ago, your God preprogrammed not only the life form of the ant, but also every single strategy that ants would use to increase their prospects of survival, and indeed the role that each individual ant would play in the strategy. Multiply this by the billions of other life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders which according to you were also preprogrammed in those first living cells, or alternatively imagine your God having to give courses to all the ants that ever existed, not to mention every other organism, including bacteria and the weaverbird...And you talk of just-so stories! How about the possibility that (assuming he exists) he gave all these organisms the wherewithal to figure out their own strategies? Wouldn’t that be almost infinitely simpler, and wouldn’t that explain the huge diversity of life forms, natural wonders etc. which we know constitutes the history of life? Too humanly logical for you?