More miscellany Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, August 10, 2024, 08:32 (103 days ago) @ dhw

Insect gap

QUOTES: "In the Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous) subperiod between 323-299 million years ago, when the world was forming a single supercontinent Pangaea dominated by vast tropical swamp forests, this large diversity of different winged insect groups appeared suddenly without any known transitional forms "

"It is a signal that tells about a saltational history of life, with a series of bursts of biological creativity that can only be explained with the goal-directed infusion of new information from outside the system". (David’s bold)

DAVID: As Gould noted the biggest secret among paleontologists ae all the large gaps in the fossil record. This account suggests de novo developments in the insect record. Note my first bold: No stem organism. The last bold just above is more evidence of Bechly's acceptance of ID. It seems he is now in the same position as dhw.

I’m not sure what his position is, but what is always striking about these sudden bursts of creativity is that they coincide with major changes in the environment. You yourself have fluctuated in your views on the extent to which your God engineers environmental changes, and it would be interesting to know Blechly’s view on this. I’m not convinced by the bold above. The new information does not have to come from outside the “system” if the system is one of ever changing conditions which will result either in extinction, adaptation, or innovation. This will be the case, whether there is or is not a God, and if there is, whether he controls every environmental change that triggers the three consequences. My own position, as you know, remains open, and while accepting the feasibility of the divine design argument, I also accept the feasibility of the argument that intelligent cells might have designed their own innovations in response to changing conditions, and their intelligence may have been given to them by your God.

Plant controls

QUOTES: "Researchers at Michigan State University have discovered two proteins that work together to determine the fate of cells in plants facing certain stresses."

“The cell will jumpstart a mechanism known as the unfolded protein response, or UPR, to decide what to do next. If the problem can be resolved, the cell will initiative life saving measures to resolve the problem. If it cannot be, the cell begins to shut down, ending its and potentially the plant's life.”

DAVID: this looks like a designed system to help plants handle stresses like drought. How likely is it for a chance mutation mechanism to find the exactly needed proteins??

I agree. Over and over again, we see that all life forms are possessed of some form of intelligence which directs their actions in response to conditions. It’s hard to imagine chance as the problem solver, but it’s equally hard to imagine that your God would preprogramme or dabble every single organism’s response to every single condition and problem that might arise throughout the whole history of life. Some form of panpsychism, however, would seem to offer an explanation – that all living things are possessed of some form of intelligence. If this were to be the case, then of course the source would still remain an open question, some kind of designer God being a possible answer.

Symbiotic controls

QUOTE: "Endosymbiosis, a phenomenon in which one organism lives inside of another, exists across several species. “It’s basically the basis of life,” said Ingrid Richter, a microbiologist at the Leibniz Institute. (DAVID’S bold)

Disregarding the tautology, we should perhaps remember that this was the revolutionary theory proposed by Lynn Margulis, who championed the theory of cellular intelligence. Of course we ourselves are prime examples, since there are billions of bacteria whose lives depend on us just as ours depend on them.