More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Saturday, October 29, 2022, 09:13 (517 days ago) @ David Turell

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."

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: No progress. We feel his inquiries about agency imply design is required.

So they don’t accept his concept of organisms as autonomous, intelligent agents, but they do accept that his concept of organisms as autonomous intelligent agents requires design?

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.

dhw: 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).

DAVID: Fossils in Cambrian and Ediacaran are not rare in China!!! Can't change facts!

The ones which might establish links between the two eras are rare. Some species fossiize more easily than others (e.g. trilobites). The Chinese research team has just found one link, and they say that new discoveries are being made all the time.

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Required if God did it.

Are you suggesting that God may not have “done it”? Or are you suggesting that you and I and the rest of the human race would not exist or would not find enough food if he hadn’t put snake genes into frogs on Madagascar?

Toxoplasma

I don’t suppose you’d care to offer us a reason why your God, who apparently designed every life form with a purpose, would have designed and presumably preprogrammed this very clever parasite.


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum