David's theory of evolution: James A. Shapiro's view (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 04, 2019, 01:02 (1815 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: My fight is with unthinking Darwinists. During Darwin's time many of his contemporaries fully disagreed with him with arguments I use.

dhw: I have pointed that out many times. This website arose out of my own critique of what I consider to be Dawkins’ “unthinking Darwinism”. However, there is no need to bring that into every thread, and it is no excuse for repeating personal attacks on Darwin himself, as you have done with your racist slur.

Darwin thought Africans were inferior. Perhaps that was OK in his time. It is claimed that Nazi racial cleansing was based in his works, which isn't his fault.

Transferred from “Evolutionary Innovations”:
DAVID: Shapiro did fabulous work. He is a wonderful scientist. You have made him 'poor' by what I think is misusing his theories, and you haven't read the book, only reviews.

dhw: You have quoted him abundantly in your own book, and his theory is that “living cells are cognitive (sentient) entities that act and interact purposefully…”, they “have the ability to alter their hereditary characteristics”, and “evolutionary novelty arises from the prosecution of new cell and multicellular structures as a result of cellular self-modification”. That IS his theory. How am I misusing it?

DAVID: As I have over the years my concepts have altered. I should have emphasized that his work on bacteria was something he tried to extrapolate to further understanding of the genetic role in further evolution/speciation. He was not discussing the everyday function of multicellular cells.

dhw: He was formulating the above theory which I have repeated, and I have asked you how I have misused his theory.

DAVID: you have grabbed and run with his theories when I don't think from my readings of his articles that he would agree with your conclusions.

dhw: I have quoted his conclusions, which you reproduced in your book, and they exactly express my own theory. Since I agree with him, please tell me which of my conclusions he would disagree with.

You have applied it to multicellular organisms and claim cells in those organisms can design future advanced forms. Shapiro never went that far, so you have bastardized his contribution to research in the process of evolution.

DAVID: We do know that in multicellular organisms, stem cells adjust DNA to make many different functioning styles of cells with different jobs. This is an exact replica of what bacteria do and therefore they are a forerunner of that stem cell ability! And that may be all that Shapiro has shown. That is not in any way the solution to the problem of speciation.

dhw: It is a theory concerning how speciation may have occurred. If it’s true, it solves the problem. […]

DAVID: I'll continue: the chemical signals represent information/instructions, not thought in design or planning design. Cell A might ask cell B to produce something which B knows how to do from the instructions it carries.

dhw: Yes, that is your prejudiced conclusion, though you agree that cellular intelligence has a 50/50 chance of being correct.

50/50 is the probability I have presented, which is what the evidence allows so far. Thus it is open to interpretation using other points in living biochemistry, since all we ever see is exchanging info through a series of expressed proteins with the desired results to keep life going.

DAVID: You made no comment about my idea that stem cells might represent Shapiro's bacterial work as part of how evolution produced complexity in organisms.

dhw: This is a brand new topic, and I am all ears (see “Mammalian pregnancy”).

I'll look around. It is a promising subject.