More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by David Turell @, Wednesday, October 19, 2022, 16:18 (526 days ago) @ dhw

MIGRATION

DAVID: In regard to migrations, I view your hypothesis as pure imagination, while I look at the practical side and see real problems.

dhw: Sorry, I thought we were discussing how migration might have originated. I have suggested that instead of your God saying to himself: “My one and only purpose is to design humans and their food, and therefore I must help certain birds to migrate”, the origin of migration might have been that certain birds realized that if they stayed where they were, they would freeze to death, and so they set out to find warmer climes. It may be “pure imagination” – nobody actually knows what happened –

But we are discussing migrations!! You again tell a story while I concentrate on the reality of what migrants must think about doing to get there and back.

dhw: but it’s hardly what you are about to call a “fairy tale” in the next article:

Eel migration

DAVID: this circuitous route suggests dhw's fairy tale of brave ones wandering off in hope of finding warmth fits this meandering migration. It fits in an unprepared way in just blundering around and searching. Using the Earth's magnetic field has been previously established. Which tells them just swim south and wa' la' the Azores are right in the way.

dhw: Thank you for this begrudging support for my hypothesis, but our subject was bird migration, and I don’t know why you think my hypothesis is a fairy tale. Nobody knows why eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea in order to breed and then die. Maybe the first eels evolved there, for some reason migrated all over the place, but the Sargasso Sea remained their instinctive home and so they retrace the routes taken by their ancestors. But of course I don’t know the facts any more than you do. However, perhaps you could tell us what role your God may have played, and why you think eel migration would have been an absolute necessity to enable him to design us humans and our food.

Of course, I think God guided the eels. And I am aware the study is part of a worry about European eel contribution to European food supply.


STROKE VICTIMS

DAVID: I'll accept that neurons have been initially given by God the methods to follow to repair later damage. […]

dhw: Perhaps […] you could just tell us exactly how you think your God gives/gave neurons the methods to repair later damage to the brains of stroke victims.

DAVID: The instructions are in the neuron's DNA.

dhw: I’m not asking where they are, but how you think they got there. Do you think your God put instructions for brain evolution and brain repair in the DNA of the first cells 3.8 billion years ago? Or when the first damaged brain appeared, he popped in to put new instructions into the DNA of neurons that would then be passed on to all brains? (Animal as well as human, or just human?) Or do you think he might have given the first cells the intelligence and flexibility not only to form different combinations (e.g. organs and species), but also to find their own ways of survival, including repairs?

I can't answer the timing issue of God's writing DNA instructions. Initial instructions at life's origin are obvious, but He possibly stepped in from time to time to 'dabble'.


Fine tuning and alternatives

QUOTE: Since physicists have not discovered a deep underlying reason for why these constants are what they are, we might well ask the seemingly simple question: What if they were different? What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?
"There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life.”

dhw: I am totally bewildered. 1) How can anyone know that a hypothetical universe lacks life? 2) Note the word “almost”. If they almost always lack life, they do not always lack life.

DAVID: Your editor's role is showing. The point of the essay is fine tuning, and you have no opinion?

dhw: The point of the article is to show that “Our universe’s ability to create and sustain life is rare indeed”, and to prove his point, the author has asked the question I have dealt with. I have pointed out what I think are flaws in the argument. Nobody can possibly deny that one part of our universe contains all the components that are necessary for life as we know it! But we don’t even know what else there is in our universe, let alone whether there are or have been other universes, where the “fundamental constants have other values” and other forms of life might exist or might have existed. Don’t you agree?

There is a clear theory about our universe and how it formed/evolved. The Webb telescope searching our deep past will help us in understanding the whole universe. The author clearly shows, as you agree how we fit here. An entirely different type of life could possibly be in the imagined forms of universes.


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