More Miscellany: Bechly reappears (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 29, 2024, 13:03 (176 days ago) @ David Turell

ID science

dhw: If we skip the question of origin, though, and focus only on evolution, we certainly have an alternative to chance and to divine creation of every species. And that is Shapiro’s theory.

DAVID: All Shapiro showed was bacteria can edit their DNA. His theory is an extrapolation of that fact.

dhw: Most theories are extrapolations from known facts – if they had no factual basis, nobody would take them seriously. The theory of cellular intelligence has been endorsed by growing numbers of scientists from other fields. Please don’t pretend that it cannot be regarded as an alternative to chance and separate creation by God.

DAVID: It is an unproven alternative. Everyone acknowledges cells act as if intelligent in what they currently do. Planning a very new adaptation requires more intelligence than they show.

If a theory was “proven”, it would become a fact. It is your belief that cells/cell communities are not intelligent enough to innovate, or even to think up a strategy like feigning death, or making loud noises in order to deter predators. Your God has to write a book of instructions, or pop in and give them all a course. Even your God’s existence is an unproven theory. Cellular intelligence is an unproven alternative to other equally unproven theories.

Duckbill dinosaurs and trans-oceanic dispersal

dhw: Darwin did not claim to have solved all the mysteries - he devoted a whole chapter to "Difficulties on theory" - but individual anomalies do not invalidate the main thrust of his theory, which is common descent, with natural selection determining which organs and organisms survive.

DAVID: A designer building forward from changes to past forms will create a common descent pattern.

dhw: Yes indeed. And Darwin emphasized that his theory should not “shock the religious feelings of anyone”. Thank you for once more endorsing the theory of common descent.

DAVID: My form is not your form.

You are still accepting Darwin’s theory of common descent.

The brain: studies on memory

dhw: An organism which, in your own words, “runs its own show” and “decides what to record” etc. works autonomously. God may have given it this autonomous ability, but that does not mean that its “show” and its decisions are preprogrammed by instructions.

DAVID: That is exactly what it can mean.

It runs its own show, but God runs it. It decides what to record, but God decides what it should record. Your use of language is bewildering.

Moths fake out bats

DAVID: again, it raises the question of adaption by design or by incremental steps of natural evolution. The level of complexity in acoustic science is obvious to us, but at the moth level I think they had designer help.

dhw: You simply cannot bear the thought that all forms of life might have the intelligence to work out their own ways of survival.

DAVID: When well designed by God they survive beautifully.

dhw: So were the 99.9% of extinct species not designed or badly designed by your God?

DAVID: Again, your distorted view of the pattern-method of evolution. It requires extinctions.

So your God deliberately designed and culled 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to his purpose because somebody told him that’s what you have to do if you want evolution. You can’t understand the basic explanation: that evolution proceeds only through changing conditions, which result in extinctions but also in the innovations which produce new species. There is no law that your God must obey. If he exists, this is the system he invented, and so it is fair to assume that instead of being a messy, inefficient designer, he may have had a good reason for WANTING the ever changing history of life. But you prefer to insult him.