More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Friday, October 28, 2022, 12:46 (518 days ago) @ David Turell

MIGRATION

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

dhw: It is this woolly use of the word “information” that I object to. If the “information” in their DNA means the autonomous ability (intelligence) to perceive and process information from outside themselves and to take decisions accordingly, then I accept the possibility that it was implanted by your God. But if, as you often claim, the “information” is precise instructions on how to deal with every new situation for the rest of life’s history, then I must confess to a high degree of scepticism!

DAVID: You should be very skeptical of how intelligent cells became so intelligent.

One possibility, as I keep repeating, is that your God designed them. I’m surprised that you think I should be sceptical. After all, if he could design our intelligence, why do think he could not have designed different forms and degrees of intelligence? :-)

Agency

QUOTE: "[Talbott] 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. […]

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.”

dhw: 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.

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

dhw: Then they should think again. But I am indebted to you for finding yet another supporter for the theory of autonomous cellular intelligence.

DAVID: I've read lots of Talbott directly and I can understand the ID view. His protests about design balances the design inferences in all his writings.

Well, it’s entirely up to you ID-ers whether you think you know his beliefs better than he does. But I’m delighted to hear that your comrades-in-arms approve of his theory concerning the AUTONOMOUS intelligence of our fellow organisms. This is progress indeed.

Human evolution: no hominin ancestor

DAVID: there is a major fossil gap for pre-hominin forms. It is not a Cambrian gap. We simply don't have enough fossils found to make believable series. Here I agree with dhw. We need and hope to find more. On the other hand, if Bechly is correct in his view of fossil finding, and what we have is all there is, there would be a Cambrian-like gap.

The headline of this post is horribly misleading! It turns out that fragments from millions of years ago may not be from hominins at all, but there are lots and lots of later hominin fossils which are clearly our ancestors. What is worth noting is the rarity of these fossils from just a few million years ago. All the more reason why we should not be surprised at the rarity of fossils from about 550 million years ago (pre-Cambrian).

Timed events in hippocampus

QUOTE:"Research suggests that 'time cells' – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which things happened."

I’m only mentioning this because my poor old hippocampus has enough problems remembering the things that happened, let alone the order in which they happened!

Horizontal gene transfer

QUOTES: On this island, many of whose animal species occur nowhere else, geneticists recently made a surprising discovery: Sprinkled through the genomes of the frogs is a gene, BovB, that seemingly came from snakes.
"Is there something about the environment of Madagascar that makes it a hot spot for gene transfers?”

DAVID: lots of evidence but still no answers as to how horizontal transfer occurs in eukaryotes

What an amazing island. The suggestion that there is something in the environment that accounts for these unique specimens seems to me to strengthen the argument that the environment triggers innovation and that the history of evolution is that of one vast free-for-all. If there is a God, then he would have set up the mechanisms for this and perhaps even intervened if he felt like it, but I really can’t see how the many species unique to Madagascar must have been absolute requirements for sapiens and our food.

Eukaryote origin

QUOTE: “Part of the nature of these deep evolutionary questions is that we will never know, we will never have a clear proof of some of the hypotheses that we’re trying to develop,” she says. “But we can keep refining our ideas.”

An admirable summary of the nature of this forum.


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