More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, July 13, 2024, 08:47 (131 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy (under “the complexity of cell division”):

DAVID: Proportionality is our answer
And:
DAVID: What you moan about are the cumulative results of thousands of good actions which have a tiny number of side effects.

dhw: Your omniscient God’s knowing creation of murderous viruses, floods, famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and multiple diseases, and his foreknowledge of human evils, which he nevertheless allows to take place, raises the question of how they can be equated with an all-good God. This is the subject of theodicy. The question is not answered by pretending that the degree of evil is too “tiny” to bother about.

DAVID: You accumulate from small numbers until they are large enough to complain about. The amount of good is too enormous by comparison.

The subject of theodicy is not how to measure the proportion of good to evil, but how to explain the evil created or allowed by a supposedly all-good God. Stop dodging.

Back to David’s “schizophrenia”

DAVID: Your humanized God is so much like us, He can do no wrong. He responds just as we would.

dhw: Your Jekyll and Hyde are now talking simultaneous gibberish. If he’s just like us, then he is as capable of doing evil as he is of doing good – the opposite of “He can do no wrong”. Your Jekyll says he’s benevolent, your Hyde says he can’t be. Adler says 50/50. I agree with Adler. […] Can you not see that when you say your God may have human-like attributes but he can’t possibly have human-like attributes, there must be something wrong
with your theories and with your attempts to dismiss my alternatives?

DAVID: You've lost the allegory: Jecyll and Hyde are flip sides of analyzing God.

There is no “allegory” to lose. Either your God does or does not have human attributes. But instead of saying a neutral 50/50, one minute you say he probably/possibly does have them, and the next minute you say he certainly doesn’t have them. All because you believe in a theory of evolution that makes no sense even to you, but you can’t bear to admit that it might be wrong, and you can’t bear to admit that my own logical theistic theories of evolution might be right!

Jumping gene controls
QUOTE:
'Jumping genes are fascinating," says Osakabe, the first author of the paper, "because they can cause significant changes in the genome, both good and bad. Studying how proteins like DDM1 manage these genes helps us understand the basic mechanisms of life and can have important practical applications."

DAVID: Everything in the genome is there for a reason. Purposelessness in evolution does not exist, except in Darwin's theory.

dhw: You can hardly expect Darwin to have known about all the latest discoveries concerning DNA! And I have no idea why you think the drive for survival means purposelessness. Darwin does talk of vestigial structures, but as far as I remember, these are only mentioned as proof of common descent.

DAVID: have you forgotten? Darwinism does not have directionality as purpose does.

What is that supposed to mean? If an organism migrates from land to sea, and its legs change to flippers, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the change takes place for the purpose of improving the organism’s chances of survival in its new environment. Please explain why the purpose of improving chances of survival is not a purpose.

Genome complexity

"[…] those little regulatory RNAs are generally too small to carry enough information for their unions to be very selective; they too work collectively, arriving at a decision, as it were, by committee. (dhw’s bold)

DAVID: this article describes the surprised reaction at the degree of complexity, the multi-layer of controls, as if we never escaped the Darwinian approach of cells as blobs.

Nothing to do with Darwin. You constantly bombard us with your belief that cells are nothing more than the mindless recipients of your God’s instructions. Interestingly, you also sneer at the theory that cells form interactive, thought-processing, decision-making communities, which you have scathingly called “committees”, and here, lo and behold, we have an article which actually compares their work to that of “committees”. But there is more to come in your comment:

DAVID: We can now see them as "Barbara McClintock in recognising that the genome is a responsive, reactive system, not some passive data bank: as McClintock called it, a ‘highly sensitive organ of the cell’". So, it is a swarm of regulating ncRNA's in loose control that works! Yes, surprising and highly suggests a designer at work.

As you are well aware, Barbara McClintock was a pioneering champion of the theory that cells are intelligent entities. However, one can argue that the intelligence of cells working together as cooperative communities is evidence of design.