slime mold decisions: another example (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 16, 2020, 11:05 (1589 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: "Slime moulds start out as single cells and can remain in this form all their lives if enough food is available. However, when supplies are scarce, hundreds of thousands of individuals can merge into a single, moving mass in the search for food."

DAVID: amazing evolution from single cells of mold. This story is part of mailed in website to me. Nothing more to see.

dhw: Thank you for this wonderful example of how evolution works! It started out as single cells which can still remain in the same form but also merged into single bodies of cooperating cells. And once the process of merging had begun, more and more new bodies formed, with variation upon variation as different cells pooled their individual resources. And over thousands of millions of years (we can scarcely conceive that length of time) the cooperating cells produced the vast variety of “single moving masses” that go to make up the history of life on Earth, culminating – we believe – in the most complex of all such masses: H. sapiens and his extraordinary brain. [David's bold]

DAVID: The bold is fantasy. We do not know how evolution works. We see that it happens, as you and I debate as to what is the driving force. I say God, you say intelligent cells, with the source of that intelligence up for grabs.

A misunderstanding. My apologies. I simply meant to take the slime mold as a symbol for the whole marvellous history. It makes no difference whether your God preprogrammed it all, dabbled it all, or created an autonomous mechanism to make it all happen. As far as we know, life began with single cells, some of which have remained the same while others have combined into more and more “single moving masses”, with different cells performing different functions, and with the process culminating – we believe – in us. It was the process I meant to focus on, not the driving force.