Let's study ID: giraffe plumbing (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, October 09, 2021, 08:47 (930 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Do you believe that we are descended from the new species with no precursors, or from bacteria?

DAVID: You have jumped into a big nothing. Your definition of continuous means every step followed the the last, but always with obvious precursors. I always say the Cambrian is a gap with no precursors.

Why have you stuck in the word “obvious”? I agree that the Cambrian gap is a mystery, to which I have offered a possible solution, but that is not the problem here. This is the problem:
DAVID: The Cambrian start all of our current phyla. As before, the background underlying living processes had been established sufficient for the jump to the Cambrian.

You have suddenly changed your mind: instead of us humans and our food being descended from bacteria, starting 3.8 thousand million years ago, your God apparently stepped in only 550 million years ago to dabble brand new lines of life (including ours and trilobites) from scratch. So if humans and our food were your God’s sole purpose right from the start, what was the point of all the extinct life forms that preceded the Cambrian (let alone all the extinct Cambrian [e.g. trilobites] and post-Cambrian forms [e.g. brontosaurus]) and had no connection with us and our food? Could it be that your God was experimenting, learning as he went along, getting new ideas? After all, producing brand new creations out of nothing, with no precursors, hardly suggests the continuity which is a constant theme in your assertion that ALL life forms were “part of the goal of evolving [= designing] humans” and their food.

Immunity system complexity
DAVID: They [cells] automatically recognize non-self, and automatically fit a protein shape to attach to the invader with a killing segment which in bacteria attacks their membrane integrity or to disrupt a metabolic process.

dhw: You are simply repeating your belief that it’s “automatic”, and are totally ignoring the implications of your own description of the process. Cells recognize NEW invaders and produce NEW antibodies to fight them. And according to you, they do this without any intervention from your God. These two actions require COGNITION!

DAVID: Automatic cognition. They know self from non-self automatically. They know what is foreign. You get a splinter in skin. Inflammation always happens, but here only you can solve the problem with your tweezer.

You’ve got it. I am confronted with a new problem, I recognize it, and I produce the means of dealing with it. I agree that my feeling the pain is automatic. But my recognition of the cause of the pain and my working out a solution to nullify the cause require autonomous THOUGHT.

DAVID: The process is the same for all invaders and the resultant antibody is added to the library for future reuse if necessary. The process is always the same process from birth onward. That is why no thought is necessary. Each baby comes with the process intact to build a future library.

dhw: You keep repeating what I told you. The process is the same, but the process entails producing ADDITIONS to the library which cells build up AUTONOMOUSLY. You can argue that your God set up the process, but the details change from one invasion to the next, and cells must tailor their response to each new threat. You have agreed that your God does not do it for them. You parrot words like “automatically” and “God’s instructions”, and simply ignore the obvious fact that recognizing something new and then producing something new to counter it requires thought.

DAVID: If the production of antibodies always follows the same biochemical process and uses the same killer syz's, it is always automatic. What they add to kill or neutralize is always the same.
They know non-self and they know the answer before using it.

How can the immune system already “know” the answer to a problem it has never seen before? You seem to be going back to your God’s list of instructions for every new problem and solution, and all the cells have to do is pick out the right volume from the vast library God provided 3.8 billion years ago. The PROCESS is the same, but with every new invader, there has to be a new addition to the library that is built up after birth, so please tell us what is added. As with your image of the splinter and the tweezers, there has to be AUTONOMOUS recognition (= conscious cognition) and the AUTONOMOUS finding of a solution, and that requires AUTONOMOUS thought. (Repeat: You have agreed that your God does not have to dabble.)