More "miscellany" PART ONE (General)

by David Turell @, Saturday, May 13, 2023, 17:56 (320 days ago) @ dhw

PART ONE

I was discussing your humanized God. In His context anything is possible. I am using our brain, with a factual starting point, and we see a 315,000-year-old acting as fresh today as it did long ago. It descended from previous brains who must have acted in the same way. What does your theory prove if the brains generated enlargement all own their own.???


DAVID: There are multiple mutations required for changes in brain area's functions, number of new neurons, new web patterns, and changes in skull shape and size. The proper mutations must appear in a coordinated fashion naturally. Not likely for clear thinking folk.

dhw: Of course all parts of the head and body would have to coordinate. You accept that new hippocampus neurons and new web patterns (complexifications) appear “naturally” – which I have suggested means through the autonomous actions of intelligent cells – and I see no reason why you should assume that your God did not give the same ability to the cells that encase the expanding brain. We are a community of cooperating communities of cells. That is true, whether they guide themselves or your God manipulates them.

Again brushing aside the problem that enlargement of brain requires many thousand new coordinated mutations. For survival expanding memory is a requirement. Thus, the hippocampal ability to enlarge.


Responses without a brain

dhw: Shapiro does not attempt to explain the origin of the living, intelligent cell. His theory explains evolution. But you are right: either cells are intelligent or they are not. So why should your “vast background in modern biochemistry” prove that their vast background leads Shapiro & Co. to a totally wrong conclusion?

DAVID: Stop extrapolations. All Shapiro found is bacteria edit their own DNA. That does not explain evolution. His theory hoped our multicellular organism could do that. Curranty they don't.

dhw: I might just as well say your God theory is a hope. Shapiro’s theory is based on his vast knowledge of modern biochemistry, as well as on the research of others in the field. And I have repeated it, not extrapolated it.

Shapiro's theory is an extrapolation of his brilliant work on bacterial DNA.


Back to Shapiro: how some bacteria handle DNA

DAVID: This adds to Shapiro's bacterial DNA studies but does not further advance his theory of evolution.[…]

dhw: It doesn’t need to. It has nothing to do with the overall theory of cellular intelligence as the driving force of evolutionary innovation.

Cells cannot design the processes of life. See Tony's entry.


Insects use resin

QUOTE: "Because tool use requires a level of complex cognition, it was once thought to be a way to set humans apart from other animals, but researchers are now finding more and more examples of tool use across the animal kingdom.”

DAVID: the insects live in this resin-producing grass. How much is accidental and how much is instinct is not clear.

dhw: Tool use demands a level of “complex cognition”, but as with cells, you simply refuse to believe that insects might be intelligent.

The usual non-answer to my observation. Those insects exhibit a degree of intelligence, but chance may play a role in how the practice developed.


All gaps are real

QUOTE: "Decades ago,” paleontologist Gareth Nelson wrote, “The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.”

dhw: Nelson’s comment can be taken as confirmation of my own: we cannot expect to find fossils that cover every stage of every life form’s development for the last 3.X thousand million years! Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” seems perfectly logical to me, if we assume that new species would have arisen when conditions changed (while others would have been killed off). And I would say the more radical the changes, the greater the diversity of responses, which would have included innovations as well as adaptations.

DAVID: Today's entry from ID's Bechly answers you. Species come and go creating gaps as they appear.

QUOTE: Between 410-400 million years ago, a very sudden and enormous expansion of actively swimming (nektonic) animals occurred in the Devonian era, when groups such as ammonoid cephalopods and jawed fish made their first appearance. Within just 10 million years such active swimmers increased from only 5 percent to about 75 percent of the marine faunal biodiversity.


dhw: All new species must start at some time! The question is whether they descend from earlier species or not. I suggest (and am not exactly alone in doing so) that they appear when conditions change and organisms either adapt in order to survive, innovate in order to find new ways of using the conditions, or perish. The fact that the best equipped species increased their dominance from 5% to 75% seems perfectly logical, and as always I’m surprised that 10 million years (probably = at least a million generations) should be regarded as a short time for such an obvious development. The rest of the argument was dealt with last time, and IS repeated in PART TWO.

The issue is de novo appearance is usual.


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