Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 16, 2021, 12:20 (1374 days ago) @ David Turell

Spiders lasso

DAVID: He does not tell us why He created life, and religions are full of guesswork.

dhw: Ah, he only tells you the reasons he did NOT have for creating life. And yes, religions are full of guesswork. How does that come to mean that God is interested in us (your belief) but didn’t create life because he wanted to create something that would interest him?

DAVID: Again pure humanizing

Nothing wrong with that. See “theodicy”.

EGNOR ON FREE WILL

dhw: Egnor never mentioned cause and effect. That was my complaint!

DAVID: And I've said cause and effecf are very weak theories.

You agreed that before we can talk of free will, we need to know what we are meant to be free from. The fact that you don’t believe your decisions are influenced by all the factors I listed (heredity, upbringing, chance events etc.) does not make the theory “weak”. You believe in the alternative version, which I also presented. Egnor didn’t even consider either version, and that was why I objected to his simplistic approach to the subject.

Highest speed claw snapping

DAVID: God is the designer of life and evolution. History is a clear picture of how He did it by design.

dhw: You have only offered us two forms of design, so please tell us: do you think he designed claw-snapping 3.8 billion years ago, or stepped in to perform an operation? And do you think claw-snapping was part of his goal to evolve humans and their food supply? […]

DAVID: And my preferred view is the coding for advancement was pre-inserted long before new advanced forms appeared.

So was this “coding” a specific programme designed 3.8 billion years ago for every single advancement in the history of evolution? Or did your God pop in from time to time to insert new programmes long before they were needed? Or could it have been in the form of a mechanism which could work out advancements as and when required or facilitated? Please answer.

The biochemistry of cells

QUOTE: One of the unique things with this study is that we have been able to study individual cells instead of simply entire cell populations. This has allowed us to really be able to see how the cells transition from their individual behaviour to coordinating with their neighbours.

dhw: A neat summary of the process whereby individual cells cooperate to form communities – and we can extend this to how cell communities cooperate with other cell communities as they go on to create the ever increasing variety of structures which make up the history of life on Earth.

DAVID: You shipped my comment: Comment: I do not understand how glycolytic oscillations carry messages, but no else knows either. We know DNA carries information in its code. Does the pitch of the oscillations? The advancing research raises more questions than answers.
My thought is the entire sets of layers of information and controls in the genome manages what the cells are told to do. Top down not bottom up.

Yes indeed, nobody knows. Hence my three alternatives in the questions asked above, which I hope you will answer directly. Can you think of any alternatives to these three explanations?