Cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, February 20, 2022, 08:10 (1005 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Why can't you accept the idea that God speciates, even from your iffy God? Evolution needs a designer, and to that extent, a designing mind is necessary. We won't call it God to proceed.

dhw: If God exists, I have no objection to any of this. My objections are to the theory that he designed every species, every solution, every lifestyle, every natural wonder in the history of life, and did so in anticipation of future conditions, either through a 3.8-billion-year-old programme or through ad hoc intervention to manipulate every change. You yourself have given us the example of Cambrian oxygen, which must have existed BEFORE the new species that depended on it.

DAVID: Please recognize the difference I have stated and noted yesterday. Conditions becoming ripe for new evolution is not the process of evolution itself, which is a biological response to what is available to use.

Thank you for telling me what I have been telling you for months: speciation is a response to new conditions and does not take place in anticipation of them! I don’t know where you’ve picked up the idea that anyone believes new conditions mean the process of evolution! As I wrote in my last post: "There couldn’t be any evolution if there were no organisms around to use it [the oxygen], or if the organisms didn’t have the means to adapt to or exploit the new conditions."

dhw: […] why can’t you accept the idea that your God, who you are sure enjoys creating and is interested in what he creates, might just possibly have designed the mechanisms which enable cells/cell communities to design their own methods of adjusting to or exploiting different conditions?

DAVID: Fully answered. You've agreed you wouldn't assign your plot for a play to a secondary writer. Neither would a designing God.

The analogy is pointless. God’s “plot” may have been to create an ever changing and unpredictable bush in which autonomous organisms constantly surprise him with their unpredictable designs (speciation) as well as behaviours (lifestyles and natural wonders), with humans as the most surprising and unpredictable of them all.

dhw: After all, humans have the freedom to make their own decisions, and the unpredictability resulting from such freedom would surely be more interesting for God than watching automatons doing exactly what he knows they will do.

DAVID: Again, you have no idea how you offer a humanized God who needs interesting events as considerations for what He should create.

It’s only taken you two days to backtrack. When I proposed the same theory, with the same reference to humans, you wrote: “Now you make sense. You have repeated my guesses about God and his purposes with humans as an endpoint.”

dhw: […] why would an organism try to adapt to new conditions? Because it wants to survive! You have agreed that organismal changes are designed to “improve chances of survival”. That is the purpose of the changes, even if your God designed them directly. So: 1) cells do not have crystal balls; 2) cells do not require crystal balls because they respond to their present conditions; 3) when conditions change (and not before conditions change) cells/cell communities adapt or innovate in order to improve their chances of survival. 4) The mechanism for adaptation and innovation may have been designed by your God. Forgetting your prejudice against anything that might remind us of Darwin, please explain why you find this theory untenable.

DAVID: (4) God speciates, not a secondary mechanism cells can use independently. one thru three are OK as long as you mean adaptation within existing species.

You don’t need to repeat your fixed belief. That does not tell me why my theory is untenable. I’m relieved that at last you have dropped you own theory that species are designed in anticipation of future conditions, but no, I don’t just mean adaptation. I have specified adaptation or innovation, as I am proposing that innovations are also responses to changing conditions and just like adaptations serve the purpose of improving chances of survival.

Immunity system explaining B cells

dhw: ...my question is: do all the scientists you know tell us that all cellular behaviour is governed by God’s instructions?

DAVID: Simply, yes! Among all IDers. But I constantly present articles from others who have no reason to discuss a designer.

dhw: So all ID-ers believe God issued instructions for all cellular behaviour, though they never mention God, but it’s presumably possible that there are other scientists who don’t believe this, only they don’t count because you don’t know them. Got it!

DAVID: I do read many articles by non-IDers. Of course I offer comments sowing how the findings fit design.

Let me help you: your answer to my question whether all the scientists you know “tell us that all cellular behaviour is governed by God’s instructions” should be “no”!