Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, July 29, 2021, 07:26 (1003 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If organisms are designed to RESPOND to something new by making changes, as opposed to the changes being planned and made BEFORE the arrival of something new, it is obviously nonsense to say they have already been provided with the responses before the new situation arose!

DAVID: Go back and look at all the entries on the amazing immune system. we are born with general protections and are designed to learn about every invader with newly developed responses we create. We are designed for future problem's by making new answers de novo.

dhw: Thank you for this excellent summary of the process I have been describing. […] At last you have cottoned on.

DAVID: You are the cottoning one. Have you really recognized God's design for protection?

Yes, you’ve just described it: we are designed to learn about new problems (invaders) and then create/develop new responses (de novo) to new problems. We are not preprogrammed to do so, or offered courses. This autonomous ability of ours may have been designed by your God. Thank you for at last accepting the theory and for describing it so accurately...

Immunity system complexity
QUOTE: "Scientists have long suspected that even cells that are not traditionally involved in the immune response have the rudimentary ability to remember prior insults and learn from experience.”

dhw: Yet more evidence of cellular intelligence. It may be rudimentary by comparison with our own, but it is efficient enough to do the jobs for which it is required.

DAVID: Yes, from information God implanted in them.

If they remember prior results,learn from experience, and use what they have remembered and learned, what information has your God “implanted” in them?

Theistic evolution vs Darwinism [...]
DAVID: For Darwin and I the Cambrian is still out of thin air.

dhw: I support the theory that the fossil record is incomplete, and add that the other argument used by Creationists (not enough time for these new species to evolve) becomes irrelevant if we accept the theory of cellular intelligence (which plays no part in Darwin’s thinking).

DAVID: Your invention of thinking cell committees solves your problem but is no answer for the issues of complex design and great gaps in the fossil record. […] The gaps are your wishful thinking avoiding God.

There is no avoidance of God if I propose cellular intelligence as the perhaps God-given instrument by means of which cells produce intelligent, complex designs. Gaps in the fossil record are inevitable over such vast periods

Earliest pre-Cambrian animals
QUOTE: "If sponges existed 890 million years ago, then the origin of animals must have occurred much earlier than previous fossils have suggested.”

DAVID: Very simple early animals had to have a start in our past. Doesn't fill teh Cambrian gap.

I'm glad you accept that simple animals must have existed, even though no fossils have yet been found. Please note: the cell communities have just been given an extra 300 million years to design the new complexities.

Examples of Darwinist thinking
QUOTES: small single-celled organisms may have evolved into larger multicellular life forms to better propel themselves through icy waters.
How did life on Earth, which started off teeny-tiny, get so big?
"'Once organisms get big, they have a clear ecological advantage because the physics around how they capture food become totally different […] But the hard part for researchers has been explaining how they got big in the first place."

DAVID: …so the cells knew to join forces. Darwinist magical thinking.

I didn’t know Darwinists had officially embraced Shapiro’s theory of cellular intelligence. This is good news! Whether cells started cooperating for the reason given here is obviously a moot point, but the comments on multicellularity are right on target. The whole of evolution springs from the manner in which cells have combined and cooperated to create different life forms by designing different modes of survival. (Presumably you don’t think the bacterial swimmers were trying to survive.) I have no idea why you dismiss this as more “magical” than having an unknown, sourceless mind pop in and do a psychokinetic twiddle.

New extremophiles
QUOTE: "Organisms that use other sources of energy besides solar energy exist pretty much everywhere on the planet," said Caitlin Casar. […] "You can find them at the surface of the Earth, you can find them in soil, you can find them deep in the Earth's crust, you can find them at the bottom of the ocean, in the ocean's water column, in the air.”

DAVID: Organisms can live anywhere they wish. Life was designed to appear and survive from the beginning. Only by design.

If they can live anywhere they wish, doesn’t that suggest to you a free-for-all? And doesn’t it suggest that, if your God exists, he actually designed cells in such a way that they could live and survive by autonomously adapting to whatever conditions they encountered and by solving whatever problems came their way? Or do you believe that each of them follows instructions/is given a divine course on how to extract energy from their own special surroundings, and on how to counter every other threat to their survival?