Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, December 19, 2021, 12:46 (1068 days ago) @ David Turell

T cells
dhw: Algorithms don’t make themselves! It’s you who insist that your God provided life forms with instructions (algorithms) to solve every problem for the rest of life’s history. If his instructions have led to mistakes, then who else is responsible? But maybe he did not issue such instructions. Maybe he just provided all organisms (cell communities) with the ability (intelligence) to find their own “good” or “bad” means of survival.

DAVID: What God did is in our imaginations, and depends upon the type of God in your mind when you suggest His actions, which I still see as very human, as in the decisions just stated.

Yes indeed. If we assume that God exists, you imagine him designing a system containing solutions to every problem, except that his instructions led to mistakes which even he could not correct. I imagine a God who designed a system that allowed organisms to solve or not solve problems by themselves. I have no idea why you consider your imagined God to be less human than my imagined God.

DAVID: (taken from your "Theory of evolution, Part Two"): Your so-called God chooses errors (chance mutations) to advance evolution. Who knows what monsters might be created.

It is you who unwittingly present chance mutations in the form of “errors” which your God cannot control even though he designed the system himself! I am proposing deliberate decisions as an alternative. Intelligent Design as the product of intelligent cells (possibly designed by your God) is NOT random.

DAVID: Pre-whales with flippers would never be on land. They have transitional legs in the water. Look at the fossils in the series.

dhw: Thank you for confirming that your God did not after all operate on pre-whales' legs before there was any need for them to enter the water, and for agreeing that flippers developed in response to the new conditions. That is why I chose this example to illustrate the absurdity of your theory that changes take place BEFORE they are required.

DAVID: Please look at the series before you declare absurdity. It is lots more changes than just flippers!!!

Of course it is. The flippers merely illustrate the absurdity of your theory.

https://genesisapologetics.com/whales/
QUOTE: "When it comes to the number of changes to go from a land mammal to a whale, biologist Richard Sternberg remarked, “Just think of all the parameters that would have to be modified and then multiply that by a thousand fold or more than that—that’s the scale of the problem that you’re dealing with in the context of Darwinian evolution.”[viii] One of these complex changes would be moving the reproductive organs to inside the body and somehow cooling them when they’re right next to the swimming muscles that generate heat.[…] You can’t explain the emergence of one without the other."

It all makes perfect sense. Each body is a community of cells, and each change in each cell community requires cooperation with the rest of the body. We are lucky to have fossils that show series of changes resulting in “transitional legs in the water”. (Exit your theory that your God changes bodies overnight BEFORE they have to cope with new conditions.) Just how long other changes took, and in what order they occurred, is impossible to tell without a complete step-by-step fossil record, but no one will disagree that at all stages, the cell communities must have worked together to reorganize the reproductive system. Possible explanations? Do you believe that although your God kept dabbling with transitional legs in the water, he did a total replacement operation on the reproductive systems and noses BEFORE they entered the water? Or did he make these replacements overnight after they had entered the water – because although apparently he knows everything in advance, he now realized that the original reproductive systems and noses could be improved on? I’m not suggesting that I “know” what happened. I’m simply emulating you and presumably Dr Sternberg: I see the problem and look for a feasible explanation. Given the choice between what I assume will be your explanation, as above, and the proposal that the cell communities themselves use what may be their God-given intelligence to design their own RESPONSES to the requirements of their new environment, I would see the latter as more convincing.

A cell repair design
DAVID: This system shows the designer recognized damage could happen and provided a repair system. Design requires understanding the future problems that mistakes will cause. We know this biochemistry of life creates life. We do not know if another system can work. Stating that possibility second-guesses the designer, who probably stuck with this working design as the only one available.

I agree that we do not know if another system can work. I disagree that if your God exists, he “probably” stuck with this one as the only one available. I would suggest that if he is all-powerful and all-knowing, he is “probably” capable of designing a different system, but chose this one because he WANTED the variety created by the potential for change – not in the form of “errors” which he couldn’t correct, but in the form of choices available to the components of the system. Hence the evolution of what we regard as “good” and “bad”.