Return to David's theory of evolution PARTS 1 & 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, April 07, 2022, 10:34 (959 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I view God as creating without self interest. Enjoying and being interested are secondary events.

dhw: Enjoyment and interest are not “events” but possible motives for and results of events, and I don’t know what you mean by “secondary”.

DAVID: Secondary is obvious in my view of God. God purposefully creates as a primary event. His own responses to the results occur after creation.

Of course responses to results come afterwards. But why do you insist that the results of an action have nothing to do with its purpose?

dhw: [...]Why do you wish to downplay the possible implications of your own guesses?

DAVID: They are your implications coming from your biased view of a humanized God. I carefully avoid granting those human responses to God's reasoning.

Since you’re sure he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, and may even want us to admire his works, clearly your careful avoidance of the implications is due to your biased conviction that your God creates "without self interest".

God's choice of war over peace

DAVID: I've always viewed animals as having freedom of external actions.

dhw: The question is why your God designed life as a “constant war of survival by eating”. You believe he deliberately designed the carnivores, so they had no freedom: they had to kill. But if he gave organisms free will to design the innovations that lead to speciation – based on finding efficient ways to “take in energy” – then we have a possible answer to the problem of theodicy: he didn’t design survival by killing, whether through “bad” viruses or meat-eating. Instead he designed “free-living organisms” that “have a choice with free will” (= a free-for-all)[...]

DAVID: Just a big IF based on your strange desire to have God give up control over speciation. Taht desire weakens God? Is that what you want?

It’s not a desire but a theory to solve the problem of theodicy. How does the decision to create a free-for-all denote weakness? Your version of God has him designing a system resulting in errors he can’t control, though he tries to correct them and sometimes fails. That’s what I would call weakness.

Shapiro

dhw: […] I have quoted his theory in his own words, and have neither inflated nor misused it.

DAVID: You have conflated his theory for speciation into brilliant cells running the show in the everyday processes of life.

You are conflating two different subjects. When cellular intelligence explains evolution, I follow his theory of evolution. When we discuss everyday processes, I follow not just Shapiro’s view but that of many other scientists that cells are intelligent. What would be the point of cellular intelligence if it was not involved in everyday processes? But please note the following:

Learning how proteins work
DAVID: A study in automaticity of molecules:
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-abundant-secret-doors-human-proteins.html

DAVID: This is a study of how protein molecules automatically react in living processes. This automaticity is required to allow the fantastic speed of the processes , a speed that is required for life to exist.

You constant pick on examples of automatic behaviour, and I constantly reiterate that of course much of cellular activity has to be automatic, because otherwise the system will break down. There are two contexts in which intelligence comes into play: 1) the origin of every activity; 2) how cells respond when things go wrong. An analogy would be a factory. It takes intelligence to design the machinery, things then work automatically, and only when something goes wrong is intelligence required. You have the same theory, but attribute each stage to your God's direct intervention.

Evolution as a web

DAVID:The latest interrelationships show a web, not a bush:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-evolution-is-not-a-tree-of-life-but-a-fuzzy-network

Owing to lack of space, I’ll omit the exchanges which led to David ‘s comments:

DAVID: You have never understood the delicate balances of well maintained ecosystems. Each animal contributes in its own special way.

Of course it does and ecosystems are delicately balanced. But that does not mean every animal and ecosystem was specially designed as preparation for humans and their food. Please stop dodging!

DAVID: The article continues the pecking away at Darwin orthodoxy. This web is not your desired definition. This web of interactions had a definite directionality to an endpoint.

I have now read the whole article. There's no mention or even implication of directionality or an endpoint. It's all about the mixing of genes and hybridisation: for example, there are 8oo “species” of corals that interbreed: “Veron argues that today’s corals are a product of Darwin’s classical natural selection when currents are slack, and of hybridisation when they are strong.” Ancient humans interbred with Denisovans. Now I understand what he means by “merging”: over time, the same genes will appear in a vast variety of “species”. As I said before, if you believe in common descent, then surely that is inevitable. His “pecking away” consists simply in presenting the history of evolution as a web and not a tree. If anything, I’d say a tree has more directionality than a web.