More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Thursday, March 09, 2023, 11:56 (385 days ago) @ David Turell

Slime mold decisions and Fragility of ecosystems

DAVID: All past ecosystems became our current food. That is how evolution works.

dhw: [...] Listen to yourself: “The current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms.” And “Extinct life has no role in current time.” When will you stop contradicting yourself?

DAVID: Now you usual rillusion that the past doesn't create the present. Totally irrational.

Stop dodging. 1% of the past evolved into the present.99% consisted of dead ends (your God’s “mistakes” and “failed experiments”) that did NOT evolve into the present!

Asteroids

dhw: […] can your God control asteroids or not?

DAVID: See today's entry in far out cosmology about our fine-tuned solar system. [...]

dhw: See below.

DAVID: God can design for any type of environment. Extremophiles survived snowball Earth.

Yet again: he could only design life forms that would survive in the new environment which you say he did not control. His designs were therefore limited by conditions, and so he could not fulfil his only purpose (us and our food) and instead designed the 99.9% of non-survivors you call “mistakes and failed experiments”!

DAVID: Chixculub may or may not be God's direct action.

dhw: But you are sure that he had to instruct the weaverbird and the opossum.

DAVID: Different level of action. They needed help.

Yes – different level of action. In order to design us plus food, apparently he had to design the nest and play-dead strategy. Chixculub altered the whole course of evolution, but apparently that’s just a minor matter.

DAVID (under“Neanderthal"): […] a real God knows exactly what He is creating in advance. [...]

dhw: Did your God plan the weaverbird’s nest when he created the universe?

DAVID: As He had a plan for evolution and knew the future, He knew the nest was coming.

Thank you for clarifying your belief that when your all-powerful, brilliant designer created the universe, he had already planned every future species, strategy and lifestyle including all the mistakes, failed experiments and faulty designs that had nothing to do with his only purpose (us and our food). And only God understands the logic of your theory.

Epigenetic control of gene expression

DAVID: Simple conscious activity by animals shows purposive actions. Complex planning still requires a prefrontal cortex. God provided both levels.

dhw: How simple is “simple conscious activity”? Changing structures IN RESPONSE to changes in the environment does not require planning. So a prefrontal cortex is not required for evolution!

DAVID: All of ID will disagree with you.

Do all ID-ers believe your God operated on our ancestors’ legs and backs BEFORE they descended from the trees?

Bumblebee social trends

QUOTE: "[…] adds to the ever-growing body of evidence that they are far smarter creatures than a lot of people give them credit for.”

dhw: The latter attitude is summed up by Shapiro’s scathing summary: “Large organisms chauvinism”. [...]

DAVID: Their actions are smart from following smart instructions.

Large organisms chauvinism.

Fine tuning

QUOTES: “….of the nearly 4,000 planetary systems identified to date, none of them reflect the order and arrangement of planets orbiting our own Sun. That could be because Solar System analogs are currently outside our detection ability. But from what we can detect out there, planetary systems seem to cover an extraordinary variety of arrangements.”

"At worst, Venus, Mercury, Earth, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune all get ejected from the Solar System. Smaller changes see Earth's orbit deviate wildly from its current course. Smaller changes see Earth's orbit deviate wildly from its current course, rendering our home planet less habitable, if not completely inhospitable.[/b]

DAVID: [..]. Note the bold. The whole issue is our privileged planet's habitability. Not by chance, but by design. Even those pesky asteroids are required.

I don't know how accurate all these hypotheses are, but with billions of unknown solar systems offering an extraordinary variety, and ours possibly being “less habitable” (i.e. not necessarily uninhabitable) if things were different, we are still left with unanswerable questions: are there different forms of life out there? If there are, then tweaking our own solar system could simply have resulted in different forms of life here. If there aren’t, why the billions of unknown solar systems just for the sake of ours? Asteroids aren’t mentioned, but I accept that they may have transported important ingredients for life. That doesn’t answer the question about your God’s control.

Bacterial controls in horizontal transfer

QUOTE: bacteria have developed numerous mechanisms protecting them from absorbing harmful DNA

DAVID: an advance in Shapiro's work on how bacteria handle additions to their DNA.

And he sees their “immune system”, which enables them constantly to outwit human attempts to destroy them, as evidence of their autonomous intelligence. And if they can be intelligent, why can’t other types of cell be intelligent too, and also – like bacteria – form intelligent communities?


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