LUCA latest: Shapiro redux (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 20, 2023, 11:58 (490 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course Shapiro knew all of the other research. His theory is based on his bacterial works and is an extrapolation into a theory that explains natural evolution asking, if bacteria can edit DNA why can't that explain evolution. But editing elsewhere is not present. End of theory.

dhw: Of course editing is present elsewhere! How can evolution have proceeded without it?

DAVID: Don't try that. All we know about now is epigenetics for minor adaptations, not speciation!!!

You have completely missed the point. Even if your God was responsible for evolution, he still had to edit DNA, as explained below.

dhw: But you insist that only your God could have preprogrammed the editing 3.8 billion years ago, or popped in over and over and over and over again to do a dabble (even though 99% of his dabbles had no connection with the only dabbles he actually wanted to perform). And you find this absurd theory more convincing than the proposal that he might have designed a mechanism whereby the cells themselves did/do their own editing, or ultimately failed/fail to edit themselves successfully – hence the 99% extinction rate which you prefer to attribute to your God’s messy, cumbersome and inefficient method of design.

DAVID: Your absurd approach of cell committees producing speciation is a wild theory, based solely on the observation cells act as if intelligent when it all can be explained as automaticity.

And there you go again with your built-in prejudice. If cells act as if intelligent, maybe they ARE intelligent! Why do you keep glossing over the absurdity of your own theory, as summarized above, and to which I might add all the courses your God had to give in lifestyles and strategies and navigation and nest-building etc.?

DAVID: The intense requirements for design of complex biochemical reactions requires a mind in action, one simple biochemical cells cannot create.

Biochemical cells are not simple, and their immense complexity is a potent argument for your designer God. Furthermore, you agree that their actions appear to be intelligent, but you simply refuse to contemplate the possibility that your God might actually have endowed them with intelligence. Instead you cling to the alternative theories I have summarized above, and you try to belittle Shapiro because his personal research was based mainly on bacteria.