Genome complexity: seemingly not in obvious DNA (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 11, 2020, 11:28 (1382 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: And my point is that each change was a response: skull responds to brain, pelvis (female) responds to foetus – though later you sudden jettison the importance of the foetus by focusing solely on the upright position. Spontaneously? Well, there’s a turn-up for the books. You mean your God didn’t dabble? The cell communities did it all by themselves?

DAVID: No. God did it by programming and/or dabble. Mother, Father, and new-sized baby head all happened spontaneously as God designed them.

Programming/dabbling are a strange form of spontaneity, which I understand as meaning without planning or organization. I wouldn’t accept the word anyway, as I propose that the cell communities all adjusted to the new requirements with an organized sequence of responses (not a simultaneous, programmed/dabbled expansion in advance of new requirements).

dhw:… you wrote: “I don’t believe dhw’s ‘smart cooperating cells could solve the problems by themselves, but God could easily.” So God’s easy solution resulted in hard births. Why didn’t it result in easy births?

DAVID: Silly question. Pelvis architecture is what it has to be for upright posture.

dhw: You have forgotten the “dilemma” – female pelvis architecture had to be what it had to be to give birth to the larger brained foetus. And your sudden switch does not explain why God could easily find a solution and the easy solution was a hard birth.

DAVID: It was a solution which resulted in hard births. I conducted about 90 births in my training, so I don't forget the dilemma.

You said the architecture was for upright posture, whereas you began the discussion with the problem of accommodating the foetus’s larger brain. And you still haven’t explained why your God could easily find the solution if the solution he came up with was hard. I suppose you mean he found it easy to come up with a solution that made birth hard.

DAVID: Behe is a design theorist. I've personally talked with him. He and I think alike.

dhw: I know he is a design theorist, as you are. Please tell us where he supports your theory that an all-powerful God’s one and only purpose was to specially design H. sapiens, but first he specially designed 3.X billion years’ worth of extinct, non-human life forms, natural wonders etc. And please explain how his theory disproves the theory summarized above.

DAVID: His 'Darwin Devolves' book shows his scholarship in evolutionary theory. He looks to the genome for all sources of the information that runs living biology (cell intelligent processes). I discussed this with him personally. He does not accept your theory of intelligent cells. Since he thinks degrading DNA advances evolution, he obviously thinks that pre-programming happened. I presented this thought in the past.

I’m quite happy with the idea that cellular intelligence lies within the genome, but thank you for discussing my idea with him. As regards degrading and preprogramming, please see the entry under “brain expansion”.