Cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 12, 2022, 18:00 (985 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: My point is that it is perfectly possible for life forms to exist without eating one another. And yet your all-powerful God was apparently unable to design life without there being “a constant war to survive by eating”. Could your God NOT have designed forms of food that wage war? Does grass, for instance, fight to survive by eating? Since there IS a constant war, would it not make more sense to assume (theistic theory) that this is what your all-powerful God intended?

The point is every form of life needs an intake of energy .

Evolution of consciousness (This article is a review)

QUOTE: They [the authors] argue that minds of a sort have existed since the first archaea colonized the planet, billions of years ago.

DAVID: Shapiro found bacteria edit DNA? So do we. Bacteria do not think n or do we mentally methylate in DNA,

dhw: Shapiro found that cells, including bacteria, possess the “sensory, communication, information-processing and decision-making capabilities” which we associate with intelligence. That does not mean they think like us.

Agreed

dhw: You keep hiding behind the meaningless term “secondhand”. You believe your God gave humans the autonomous ability to design a thermostat. Why then can you not believe that he could give cells the autonomous ability to restructure themselves?

DAVID: Because that is exactly secondhand design, or an original designer gives the job an assistant with some instruction. but I'll bet in real life the real designer checks it before releasing it.

dhw: Theistic theory: God invents human intelligence, and human intelligence invents thermostats. God invents cellular intelligence, and cellular intelligence invents ways of surviving. You accept the first, but regard the second as impossible. Why? Because you have a fixed belief that your God’s one and only purpose was to design humans plus their food, and so he had to control cellular inventions. But this leads to the absurd notion that he deliberately controlled countless inventions that had no connection with humans and their food – and as you have confessed yet again, you have “no idea why God chose his evolution method”. Maybe that was NOT his evolution purpose or method, and so maybe he did NOT control cellular inventions.

Another contorted view of God as the designer of all organisms. See just below:

Carnivorous plant origin

DAVID: Again you ignore 'stepwise'. Just saying it perfected itself means you do not understand the problem. The parts all have to work together or the eating system is worthless.

dhw: Again you ignore the possibility that such changes may entail old systems continuing to work in tandem with the new system until the latter finally takes over. On the other hand, I find it excruciatingly difficult to believe in a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for certain plants suddenly to switch to meat-eating, and I have the same problem imagining your all-powerful God suddenly popping in at various times to insert various meat-eating mechanisms in various plants as preparation for humans and their food millions of years later.

DAVID: Carnivorous plants can't create digestive enzymes without also simultaneous creating self-protections. Multiple coordinated mutations all at once? Not stepwise Darwinism as you favor.

dhw: Maybe initially some plants died before they perfected the system, just as millions of bacteria die before the survivors perfect their defences.

Same blind prayer that step-wise works.