More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by David Turell @, Wednesday, October 26, 2022, 15:55 (519 days ago) @ dhw

MIGRATION

dhw: How many more times do I have to agree that the source of that intelligence might be your God? But the theory you cannot abide is that the cells make their own decisions in their quest for survival and are not mere robots obeying your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old instructions, or following his ad hoc courses and/or undergoing individual operations for every new strategy, lifestyle or natural wonder in the whole of life’s history.

And you cannot abide an active God in control who designed cells that made decision based on His implanted information in their DNA


Immunity system complexity

QUOTES: … individual bacterial cells possess their own autonomous, innate immune system that can identify, locate and deal with intruders.
"These immune systems aren't exclusive to bacteria—they exist in the cells of plants and human beings."

dhw: Thank you once more for your integrity in providing material that supports ideas you disagree with. An autonomous ability to identify, locate and deal with something can only denote some form of intelligence (as opposed to robotic obeying of instructions). But as usual, the question of how that autonomous intelligence came into existence remains open – the source might be your God.

I always present new-found immune systems but ignore the Darwinian suppositions of the science news writers. God gave them the ability to identify.


Agency

QUOTES: A grasp of just what it is that enables an entity to act as an autonomous agent, altering its behaviour and environment to achieve certain ends, should help reconcile biology to the troublesome notions of purpose and function. (dhw's bold)

This reveals a crucial dimension of agency: the ability to make choices in response to new and unforeseen circumstances. (dhw’s bold)

dhw: You can’t have agency without an agent, and in the context of speciation, the autonomous agent or “entity” would be the intelligent cell responding to new circumstances.

DAVID: How did the cells gain that 'intelligence' which requires the acquisition of a mass of information? Enough to make an icefish. Teleology requires agency is Talbott's point. I agree and I have my agent.

dhw: If an entity has a purpose, e.g. to survive in a changing environment, then of course it needs the ability to acquire information, process it, and decide what it can do in order to adapt itself or even find new ways of exploiting those changes. There is nothing to argue about here. I don’t know if Talbott is advocating God making all the decisions. I did a quick google to try and find out. I failed******, but did come across this interesting snippet:

"He attempts to show how our understanding of the organism and its evolution is transformed once we recognize and take seriously the organism as an intelligent agent meaningfully (though not necessarily consciously) pursuing its own way of life."

dhw: The organism as an intelligent agent sounds to me much more Shapiro-like than Turell-like.


*******Later: I have found another website:
“Life All the Way Down”: Stephen Talbott’s Biological Vision
https://evolutionnews.org/2012/03/its_life_all_th

QUOTE: In fact, Talbott himself is uncomfortable with the idea of design and his worldview doesn’t seem to include a God, either. “The word [design] has its legitimate uses,” he writes, but “you will not find me speaking of design.”

Clearly, then, he is advocating autonomous intelligence, as opposed to organisms (cell communities) obeying your God's instructions. Thank you again for providing further support for this theory.

I know he sits on his own fence, but I found him through ID, whose folk think he supports design with his agency commentaries.


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