Let's study ID: giraffe plumbing (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, September 25, 2021, 07:08 (943 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: [..] why do you think your God is incapable of creating autonomously intelligent cells?

DAVID: I never said God is incapable of creating autonomous intelligent cells. I said He would not choose to do so.

Why not? Why do you think he would choose to provide the first cells with a programme for every single undabbled evolutionary change, econiche, strategy, lifestyle, natural wonder etc. in the whole of life’s history, rather than design a single mechanism that will go on and on producing new designs of its own? Especially bearing in mind that you think he actually only wanted to design one life form plus its food!

DAVID: Your gradual response to environment needs is a totally unsupported theory, since all fossil species appear fully formed. You should be able to show multiple progressive intermediates. The gaps support design.

dhw: Of course all fossils were once fully formed. You couldn’t have a fossil of a life form that never lived! Every fossil find is an event, but you expect to find a continuous fossil record of every stage of every life form!

DAVID: non-answer. New species appear as new developments and thus the gaps in the fossil record. Even intermediate forms have gaps before and after in the series.

Of course there are gaps in the fossil record. You yourself have emphasized over and over again that evolution is a continuous process, but do you honestly think that every single stage of every single life form for the last three thousand million years should have left a specimen behind? Every stage of every species was once a fully formed organism, but dead bodies disintegrate in time!

Immunity system complexity
QUOTE: During an infection or after a vaccination, mature B cells form germinal centers, a sort of pop-up training facility. There, the cells mutate and rearrange their antibody-encoding genes, until they either produce an improved antibody or die trying.

DAVID: These B cells are designed to act quickly, no actual thought involved. It is an irreducibly complex system designed all at once. It cannot be evolved by chance or step-by-step.

dhw: But these cells rearrange themselves during an infection, and infections are ongoing. The immune system typifies the whole process: cells respond to new conditions. You can argue that the cell is “irreducibly complex”, but cells combine, cooperate, communicate, restructure themselves, take decisions etc., and the result of these combined activities is the vast variety of life forms etc. that make up the history of evolution.

DAVID: All the result of God's designed instructions to quickly respond to new challenges.

Please be more precise. Did your God leave them a note to say: RESPOND QUICKLY. Or did he leave them a list of instructions on what changes to make to themselves in order to meet every new challenge for the rest of life’s history? Or did he simply leave them with the autonomous ability to work out how to respond to new challenges as and when they arose?