Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 15, 2021, 19:22 (1255 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: God's goal was to produce us at the end of the evolutionary process. That is my solid logical position. [/i]

dhw: It would be logical were it not for the fact that you insist he directly created millions of other life forms, econiches, lifestyles, natural wonders etc, and 99% of these had no connection with humans.

Amazing! Your objection exactly describes God's evolutionary process!!!

DAVID: Even the Genesis Eden story realizes a direct creation requires a garden filled with food supply. The huge bush of life is required to support our current population. Your complaint is the DODGE.

dhw: Of course we need food. But 99% of the life forms and food supplies you tell us he designed individually had nothing to do with humans! Why don’t you listen to yourself? “The current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms.” “Extinct life has no role in current time.”

You are again just slicing evolution into unrelated segments. The term evolution requires continuity.

Ingenious research tricks

dhw: […] God inventing cellular intelligence to run evolution is just as theistic as God dabbling or providing a 3.8-billion-year old computer programme for the whole of life’s history.

DAVID: Wrong. Initial life is a speciation!!! You like to slice and dice processes like evolution. Same DODGE.

dhw: In my theory, the first cells (possibly designed by your God) would have contained the mechanisms for evolution (reproduction, heredity, potential for variation) plus the intelligence required to use the mechanism and change structures to meet or exploit new conditions. The very first cells were the very first species, if you like, but evolution is the history of all their changes...what have I dodged?

You sort of made it disappear. First life is directly continuous to what follows.

Magic embryology
DAVID: We can see what works, but do not know how it works or why it works. Our knowledge of genomics is still on the outside looking in.

dhw: And from the outside, it looks as if the components are acting and cooperating intelligently. You grant that it’s 50/50, but you know it’s not.'

I strongly believe it is not.

Introducing the brain
QUOTE: In this region, many of the stem cells are in a quiescent state, sensing signals in the environment that stimulate them to awaken and transform into new nerve cells.

dhw: Again I wonder if the flexibility and versatility of stem cells might not be the key to the way cell communities speciate as they interact with environmental conditions.

Stem cells are very specialized to become regular cells which are never that specialized.

Consciousness: free will exists
QUOTE: Experiments spanning the 1960s and 1980s measured brain signals noninvasively and led many neuroscientists to believe that our brains make decisions before we do—that human actions were initiated by electrical waves that did not reflect free, conscious thought.

dhw: I note the separation between “brain” and “we”. I imagine some neuroscientists think “we” ARE our brain. Personally, I don’t see how the speed of the electrical waves solves anything anyway. The argument about free will is not confined to the speed of electrical waves in relation to decisions taken. It revolves around all the factors that influence our decisions but are beyond our control, including our brains, bodies, heredity, upbringing, environment, chance events etc, We have discussed this many times.

Part of the article I quoted reestablished a proper interpretation of Libet's thoughts.