Cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, January 24, 2022, 12:33 (1032 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: Of course all women now come with the same pelvic form! We’re talking about how that form ORIGINATED when brains grew larger! I propose that changes occur IN RESPONSE to conditions and not in anticipation of non-existing conditions: here the relevant cells would have communicated and cooperated – as I described yesterday – when it was clear that the existing birth canal would have difficulty accommodating the newly existing larger brain. You say your God operated on individual women even before they got pregnant. (GOD to virgin pre-sapiens: “I’m operating now because one day in the future, you might have a baby with a big brain.”) That is what I find weird.

DAVID: How do women's pelvic bone cells communicate with baby skull cells? Telepathy? Your theory is beyond weird.

So now you are even telling us that cells don’t communicate! When your brain tells your hand to lift your pen, how’s it done? Telepathy? The pregnant woman’s birth canal had to respond to the size of the baby, and all the connected muscles and bones had to respond at the same time. The term I’d use for this process is “adaptation”. I'm sure you've heard of it. And surprise, surprise, the birth canal and the connected muscles and bones all consist of various cells. The size of the baby would therefore have been the trigger that set in motion the communication and cooperation between all these cell communities. As I wrote before in the response which you ignored, there are sure to have been many deaths in childbirth before natural selection established the new birth canal and pelvis as the norm, and indeed the design still causes problems.

dhw: You claimed your God designed ALL species in advance of the conditions in which they were to survive. I propose that whether God designs them or not, the conditions must change before the species come into existence. You have now conceded that this is true of “major gaps”. I propose that it is true of ALL species. I can see no logic in the concept of innovations taking place before the existence of the conditions they will survive in or exploit.

DAVID: Still forgetting our huge brain 315,000 years before the uses in modern civilization, as you admitted is my great example of design.

It is your favourite example, which I have categorically opposed on the grounds that we know the brain RESPONDS to new requirements, as opposed to changing itself in anticipation of new requirements. We have discussed this in detail several times, so please don’t pretend that I agree with you.

Camels' noses

dhw: I’m delighted to see your flexibility. A couple of days ago, the camel’s nose was so complex that it was “far beyond dhw’s wishes for cellular intelligence”, but now it is nothing major. So did your God pop in to operate on camels’ noses or preprogramme them 3.8 billion years ago, or did he give the cells a mechanism whereby they could design these precise and effective complexities themselves independently of any intervention by himself?

DAVID: I originally proposed both ways: "Comment: Great design, as usual better than the ones we make. Did this come with the original camelids? One can propose starting close to a desert and by slowly venturing out the design develops. But the complexity is precise and effective and I believe far beyond dhw's wishes for cellular intelligence. Cells just ain't that smart…” As you see I can imagine either way it came.

No you can’t. Now you are even twisting your own words! You tell us there are two theories, and you categorically reject one! You can’t imagine cells being “that smart”!

DAVID: With further evolved thought about camel noses I can go either way and accept epigenetics, a God-given mechanism, as the cause.

So you have changed your mind (beautifully disguised as “further evolved thought”) because you now realize that you contradicted yourself. Epigenetics does not rule out cellular intelligence. Any change in the response of genes to their environment can still entail the “sensory, communication, information-processing and decision-making capabilities” (Shapiro) that denote intelligence. But I’m delighted at your conversion to the idea that your God may have created a mechanism that enables cells to act autonomously, even in cases of precise and effective complexity.