Cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 22, 2022, 14:49 (830 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: In skull and brain changes the Mother's cells must need to know in advance how big the new baby's skull is going to be. That is not cooperation but knowing what is coming.

dhw: No doubt there’d have been plenty of problems and deaths in childbirth before natural selection determined that the larger birth canals took over, and in fact it’s still a major problem.....In your theory, the flexible cell communities follow the same process of size and/or shape-changing, except that it’s done by your all-powerful, all-knowing God popping in and performing one-by-one operations on a group of women. (In my theory, the individual intelligent cell communities respond in the same way to the same conditions = convergence.) But your God apparently performed his one-by-one canal operations before those women got pregnant: in fact he restructured the relevant flexible cell communities even though some of the women may never have got pregnant at all. Weird.

All women come with the same pelvic form! Your comment is weird. Pregnancy is not a requirement

dhw: And I can’t see what is “humanizing” about the invention of flexible, intelligent cells.

DAVID: I've answered: God will not desire to reach His goals by handing off to the cells secondhand designing. Cells might not go in His desired direction unless He constantly instructs them.

dhw: How many goals has he got? You keep saying he only has one – us and our food. How do you know that his “desired direction” was not to create a vast, ever changing bush of life full of surprising and unpredictable life forms and natural wonders – which actually happens to be a pretty good description of life’s history. You simply answer my question by pretending you know what God does and doesn’t desire! When did he tell you?

Analysis of His works with an open mind. Humans are an endpoint for which God spent 3.8 billion years preparing the way for their survival, exactly life's history as seen by a true theist.

DAVID: [under “Biochemistry"…] all new conditions allow exploitation as more oxygen allowing more organismal complexity.

dhw: And so you agree that conditions change BEFORE organisms (cell communities) change. Cell communities do not change IN ANTICIPATION of new requirements.

DAVID: Only in a major gap like the Cambrian or plant bloom are the conditions prepared for a major change/advance.

dhw: So when pre-whale legs change into flippers, you now agree that it is in response to the new conditions and not in anticipation. Thank you.

I'm discussing major gaps! You are not. Stay on point. Water and land existed all at the same time for semi-aquatic pre-whale mammals. God simply helped them become aquatic! The gaps have sequential condition issues prior to the appearance of new more complex forms

Camels’ noses
DAVID: […] the complexity is precise and effective and I believe far beyond dhw's wishes for cellular intelligence.

dhw: […] Of course the complexity is precise and effective, and I don’t have a problem with it developing as camels became more accustomed to life in the desert - just as whale flippers would have developed as they settled down to life in the water. If humans can invent mechanisms that perform wonders, why can’t God? And for good measure, do you really believe that your God specially designed camels’ noses as part of his one and only goal to design humans and their food?

DAVID: I agreed camel's nose can be an adaptation.

dhw: Thank you. And so if your God didn’t pop in to operate on camels’ noses, but created a mechanism that would enable them to make what you yourself describe as “precise and effective” complexity, then (if he exists), he must have given the cells an autonomous mechanism to do their own designing of precise and effective complexities.

Same species using God's epigenetics. Remember? Nothing major. I'm much less rigid than you imagine from your rigid viewpoint of me and my thoughts.