Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Sunday, September 12, 2021, 11:28 (1166 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: There are two parts to design for God: first a basic living biochemical system for cells to run on, which began at life's origin; second stage, designing successive stages with thoughtful anticipation of future needs.

dhw: First stage, agreed. Second stage, do you mean a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for every evolutionary innovation, or do you mean ad hoc dabbling when he looks into his crystal ball?

DAVID: I don't know from the evidence. There is co-evolution occurring with the Earth changing from 3.8 bya and evolutionary forms changing, all under His control. Did He follow a plan or set up an overall plan? I can't 'know' the answer.

You don’t ‘know’ if it was a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for all changes, or ad hoc dabbling, and although you won’t admit it, you don’t know if it was all under his control, and you don’t know that his ‘plan’ was not to give free rein to his invention. Nor, in passing, do you know that he designed every life form, or that every life form was part of a plan to produce humans, even though the vast majority of extinct life forms had no connection with humans.

DAVID: Living cell communities in organisms are incapable of the second stage...

dhw: I agree that cell communities don’t have a crystal ball. My proposal is that they react to new conditions, not that they foresee them. It is not a fact but simply your belief that cell communities are incapable of autonomous reactions to new conditions.

DAVID: Whoa!!! Organisms make small epigenetic adaptations.

Yes, we know that. And there is a theory that they may also be capable of large adaptations and even innovations, but you just happen to know that they can’t – hence your authoritative statements, even though you sometimes offer odds of 50/50.

DAVID: ...and so it is easier for God to do the design rather than instructing them how to do it. It doesn't require your implied enormous number of dabbles with a basic system in place.

dhw: But you keep telling us that the cells obey instructions! Now they don’t even do that! God comes in and makes all the decisions and does all the twiddles for them! And how can this possibly be easier for God than coming up with ONE mechanism which will enable him to sit back and do nothing while all the cell communities use their God-given intelligence to work out their own designs?

DAVID: I repeat from my experience. It is easier to do it yourself than to tell others how to do it.

And I repeat that until now you have had your God preprogramming changes or issuing instructions. Suddenly you have him popping in to make every decision, solve every problem, perform every operation. So much easier, apparently, than inventing a single mechanism that will accomplish all those tasks without him having to lift a metaphorical finger.

Function in cells
QUOTE: “...the same protein can exert distinct functions depending on the effector it binds to. At the molecular level, protein functions thus translate into protein dynamics, which is key for the development of all cellular processes, from cell division to energy provision and cell fate determination.”

dhw: In the quote, they say that the molecular changes are key to all cellular processes, including cell “fate determination”, which I take to mean “function”. If the article does describe how cells change their function, that would surely help us enormously in our efforts to understand how evolution happens.

DAVID: This is within single cells.

But single cells form combinations.

DAVID: 'Fate determination' involves how embryology works with cells following signals to arrive at given places and function.

But still using the same processes, some cells can change their function. That would surely be highly relevant to our understanding of how evolution works.
The rest of your post changes the subject to “mistakes”, which we are discussing on the theodicy thread.