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

by David Turell , Thursday, December 19, 2019, 15:16 (1799 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: And there you have it in a nutshell: different cell communities cooperate (function synergistically) in working out solutions to new problems. And so theoretically it is perfectly feasible that this ability, while clearly being responsible for adaptation, might also be responsible for innovation.

DAVID: Not so fast. They are designed to act together.

dhw: That can mean your God designed the intelligence that enables them to act together. It does not mean that he preprogrammed or dabbled every single cooperative action in the history of life.

God created the evolutionary process, as the designer. Preprogramming and dabbling are two obvious guesses as to how He performed His action.

QUOTE: "Adaptive immunity, also called acquired immunity, develops over time. When it encounters re-infection with a foreign antigen, it "remembers" having seen the infiltrator in the past. Memory T cells are part of adaptive immunity. They quickly convert swarm the invader in a rapid response based on the "memory" of a past infection.”

dhw: This is also how bacteria work. They swarm, and “acquire immunity”, and “remember” past infections once they’ve solved the problem, and yet they are single-cell and have no neurons or memory T cells. One might be tempted to believe that since the single cell is just as capable of solving new problems as cooperating cell communities, cognition and sentience and information processing and communication skills and decision-making (all hallmarks of intelligence) are not confined to organisms with a brain.

DAVID: And I will still insist they act under automatic instructions. The multicellular immune/memory cooperative system is designed to work that way.

dhw: To work what way? The system may have been designed to work out its own solutions to problems as and when they arise. Your alternative, though you always fight shy of spelling it out or accuse me of misrepresentation, is that 3.8 billion years ago, your God preprogrammed the first cells with every solution to every problem that bacteria would face for the rest of time, or he pops in whenever a new problem arises. How else could the system receive its “automatic instructions”, and don’t you find this a little hard to swallow?

It is difficult for you to accept my theories about how God acted to conduct evolution. I'll repeat the above comment: "God created the evolutionary process, as the designer. Preprogramming and dabbling are two obvious guesses as to how He performed His action." The meaning is simple. A God in charge runs things. Agnostics tend to be non-swallowers about this.