Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 22, 2021, 20:54 (1101 days ago) @ dhw

INFORMATION

DAVID: Initial life used information to run itself.

dhw: Initial life means living organisms. And I’m delighted to hear that living organisms used information to run themselves. Welcome to the Land of Shapiro.

Shapiro never told use who or what supplied the necessary information.

DAVID: Where did it cone from? OOL research assumes when RNA world assembled itself, the information it carried simply appeared. Totally stupid. The information life uses to produce its reactions and processes exits. Why dos it frighten you so much? Because it implies a mind designing life?

dhw: I am not in the least frightened of the word information, and frequently use it myself. I simply object when people use it indiscriminately and confusingly. There is no question that living organisms use information to produce their reactions and processes. How else could they respond to the world they live in? But information is passive. It produces nothing. It can only be used by a living organism. I object to what I see as an unnecessarily confusing use of language.

You are just editorially picky.

Little Foot
DAVID: The conclusion is obvious: first down from the trees, then later arm and hand dexterity development, and finally brain enlargement followed by brain complexity, driven by what natural force, if any? Noting chimps remained essentially unchanged, why did we bother to keep changing. I will always believe God did it.

dhw: The natural force would be the drive to improve chances of survival. Chimps didn’t need to change, as they were able to survive perfectly well with what they had. Once our ancestors had descended from the trees, for whatever reason, they learned/developed new skills to enable them to cope ever more efficiently with the new conditions. I don’t have a problem with the proposal that the mechanism which enabled all organisms to develop new methods of coping with new conditions may have been invented by your God. But I do have a problem with the idea that every branch of the vast bush of life was divinely preprogrammed or dabbled for the sole purpose of producing H. sapiens’ brain.

DAVID: I know your problem.

dhw: And you have never solved it!

All we know is that they did descend and then surprisingly grew huge brains and transformed the Earth.

Homo luzonensis
DAVID: our evolution is convoluted and obviously our ancestors wandered all over the place, even across oceans. But the main line is still erectus to sapiens.

dhw: And this compounds the problem I have with your fixed beliefs. Why all the different lines, not only of the millions of organisms and lifestyles and econiches and natural wonders that had nothing to do with humans, but even of hominins and homos? Could all of them really have been necessary for God to specially design before he specially designed H. sapiens?

Look at the example of evolution, a huge bush, all branches and twigs in every direction. Why not hominins? We arrived as the sole survivor in the end. You love to an analyze God's methods and criticize. Remember, God never thinks exactly like you think He does your continuous mistake about Him.

Corpse flower gene loss

DAVID: If the host plant is doing most of the work, shucking unneeded genes is a logical result.

dhw: Yes, the principle can be applied to all forms of evolution: once the “work” can be done efficiently by a new combination of “workers”, some of the old workers can be made redundant. This applies to speciation in general and to the human brain in particular.

The brain, yes. Because we were given a huge excess to use and modify into very capable set s of segments which allowed us to be so prolific in our pursuits, as God planned for us, not knowing what free-willed humans might want to invent. Some branches quickly pursued new brain uses while others are still stuck back at very primitive stages. Human Free will on exhibit.