Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, January 03, 2022, 13:26 (1053 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I do not believe that your all-powerful God was incapable of designing a system without errors, and was incapable of correcting some of those errors but left it to us to do so.

Under “How cells eat and poop”:
QUOTE: "The way cells consume and expel vesicles plays a key role for living organisms. The process helps clear bad cholesterol from blood; it also transmits neural signals. The process is known to break down in several diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer's disease."

These, I take it, are some of the “errors” your God was unable to avoid and also unable to correct.

DAVID: The bold is your invention of a concept of God that assumes He can do anything. My approach is exactly the same but my theory also notes that He presented the only working system available. And that concept is strongly supported by all the editing systems built in by God who knew of the problem!

So your approach is that he is all-powerful, can do anything, but is incapable of designing a system without errors and is incapable of correcting some of the errors his design has produced. And this apparently makes him stronger than my proposed God, who deliberately created the system in such a way that cells would be flexible enough to vary their nature in pursuit of their own survival.

T cells
dhw: How can the immune system of humans, including their T cells, have been “complete from the beginning” when the only life forms were single-celled bacteria?

DAVID: Strange comment. Remember I think species were designed prepared for their existence. All forms after bacteria are more complex in stages, but bacteria had much of the necessary cellular biochemistry needed to go forward with more complex designs.

I propose that the first cells had the mechanism needed to produce all the innovations that led from them to worms, dinosaurs, humans and the duck-billed platypus: namely the flexibility and intelligence to change their structure in cooperation with other cells and in response to changing conditions. Once more: single-celled bacteria did not have T cells. I propose that these evolved when vertebrates first came on the scene, and new solutions were required by the arrival of new problems, thus mirroring the whole course of evolution.

Zebrafish inner ear
DAVID: I've admitted I do not know how much design was pre-planned and how much intervention was required along the way. If a designer God is accepted it doesn't matter.

dhw: Agreed, except that if intervention was “required”, it suggests that your God had to respond to new conditions, which suggests that he had not got everything planned “from the beginning”.

DAVID: God may have changed the conditions Himself. Schroeder wondered if God threw Chixculub.

Agreed. I offered the same example. Did Schroeder and do you believe God planned Chixculub “from the beginning”, or could it be that as evolution progressed, God decided to change its course…sort of learning as he went along, or losing interest in what then existed and looking to create something different?

dhw: Yes, humans with our extraordinary levels of conscious are extra surprising, but so is the whole of life. However, perhaps you will finally inform us of your purposeful God’s purpose in creating not only humans, but ALL forms of life, plus all the econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders that had no connection with humans.

DAVID: I don't know God's mind and thinking for purposes, so I look at the results and reach the obvious conclusion, all that is here is what He wanted.

Except of course for the errors in his system, which he didn’t want because he tried and sometimes failed to correct them. And let us not forget all that WAS here, which would also have been what he wanted, and which had no connection with humans and their food.

DAVID: I know you can't tell me His underlying thoughts either, but I'll ask the same of you. Posing as a sort-of theist what were God's purposes?

Why won’t you tell us your own thoughts? You were not so coy in the past: as regards humans, you suggested that he may have wanted us to recognize his work and to form a relationship with him, and you were certain that he enjoyed creating things and watched his creations with interest. But then you realized that all this rather knocked on the head your silly objections to my own proposals as “humanizing” him. However, I agree with you. If he watches his creations with interest, I suggest his purpose may have been to provide himself with something interesting to watch, added to the enjoyment of creation. And I would further suggest that it is far more interesting to watch events that are unpredictable than to know in advance exactly what is going to happen. Hence the free-for-all, with the vast variety of wonders, as all the different life forms work out their own ways of survival. But maybe an occasional dabble (Chixculub, or the Cambrian) when the spectacle could do with a bit of new life. It all fits in perfectly with the history of life, don’t you think? But so too does experimentation, to try and create a life form with consciousness more like his own, or experimentation to find out what will happen if…

Your turn now.