More Miscellany: Bechly reappears (General)

by dhw, Saturday, June 01, 2024, 08:37 (173 days ago) @ David Turell

The brain: studies on memory

DAVID: No, God built in all those plasticity mechanisms to run on their own.[…]

dhw: “God built the mechanisms to run on their own” means he gave the cells/cell communities their autonomy. Since the show and the decisions clearly require intelligence, thank you for informing us that your God gave cells autonomous intelligence.

DAVID: It is a designed autonomy in appearance.

So instead of “God built those mechanisms to run on their own”, you actually meant: “God built those mechanisms to look as if they were running on their own, but in fact he laid out all the instructions for all their decisions 3.8 billion years ago, or he keeps popping in to give them instructions whenever they need to take a decision.” As I’ve said before, your theories change from one post to another, and ironically you dismiss Shapiro’s theory as unproven, but cling to the above as if it were a fact!

Moths fake out bats

dhw: As an agnostic, I don’t have a problem with the theory that there may be a God, and if there is, he designed evolution. My objection is to your invention of your God’s purpose coupled with a method of achieving that purpose which you yourself ridicule as being messy, cumbersome and inefficient.

DAVID: Funny how you defend my God.

dhw: Funny how you attack your perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, all-purposeful God as being messy, cumbersome and inefficient. But you have learned to live with all your contradictions, because first you choose the God you wish for, and you can then shut your eyes to anything that doesn’t make sense.

DAVID: Only His evolutionary method is imperfect. But that He chose it makes it OK! You are ignorant of that way of thinking.

I am certainly ignorant of how anyone who believes in an omniscient, omnipotent God can also believe that his God would choose an imperfect, inefficient, messy method to achieve his one and only goal. My way of thinking is that an omniscient, omnipotent God would only do what he wanted to do, and so whatever method he invented would be perfectly suited to the purpose for which he invented it rather than being imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient. But “you are ignorant of that way of thinking”.

Ferns attract defenders

DAVID: this adaptation shows clear purpose, which suggests design in action.

dhw: Yes it does. And by “design” you usually mean God did it. And so I will suggest that the clear purpose is survival, and the design would have been carried out through the intelligence (perhaps God-given) of the cell communities that make up the different organisms, plants as well as insects and animals.

DAVID: Your unchanged approach.

An alternative suggestion, since any readers of this will know that by “design” you mean the direct work of God

Plate tectonics

DAVID: all of this can only happen if a planet has plate tectonics. Gould said our arrival depended upon contingencies. Plate tectonics is a major one.

This seems to fit in with Raup’s contention that whichever species survived new conditions or resulted from new conditions was a matter of luck.

Cuckoos

QUOTE: "Soon after hatching, the cuckoo evicts the host eggs or chicks from the nest to become the sole occupant. The host parents not only lose all their own offspring, but also invest several weeks rearing the cuckoo, which eventually grows to around twice the size of its foster parents."

I didn’t know that the process gave rise to new species resembling the “foster parents”. A new evolutionary twist. Back in 1981 I wrote a play for children called Maxitweet the Cocoa, which told exactly the story above. The play has had quite a few productions in schools, and it contains a scene in which the parent birds send for Doctor Jay in the hope that he will be able to explain how Mrs Tweet could give birth to such a monster. Just for your amusement, here is the first verse of the song Doctor Jay sings in reply:

Every now and then you’ll find upon our Mother Earth
A bird, a fish, a plant, a mammal suddenly gives birth
To a creature with a feature that its forebears never had,
And so it turns out different from its Mum and from its Dad.
It’s only thanks to science now that we have understood
What gives the woody woodpecker power to peck on wood,
Why booby birds are silly and why foxes are so sly,
Why angler fish angle and why flying fish fly.
The answer? B’dair…mutalution.”

(“B’dair” is the squawky sound jays make, but...b'dair...what did he know anyway?) I’m pleased to tell you that at the end of the play, Mr and Mrs Tweet finally kick the cuckoo out of their nest, and Mrs Tweet has laid four more eggs.