More miscellany Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 14, 2024, 09:01 (33 days ago) @ dhw

Insect gap

DAVID: The de novo appearance of insects requires design information as in the Cambrian and also in the plant bloom event, which Darwin acknowledged was an abrupt appearance.

dhw: I am not disputing the abruptness or the design theory (as per Shapiro). Please tell us what information had to come from outside the system.

DAVID: Look at the Cambrian!! what created the new designs requiring all sorts of new information.

Once more: I agree there is new information: conditions changed and organisms responded to the changes with innovations. Conditions and organisms are inside the system. Now please tell me what information HAD to come from outside the system.

Plant controls

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Well, we agree.

dhw: Thank you. I’m delighted that you are now on the verge of accepting Shapiro’s theory as the most feasible (with the provision that your God provided the source of the intelligence).[…]

DAVID: I am not!!!

All life forms, animal and plant, are composed of cells. If you agree that they all have some form of intelligence, then you are agreeing that cells have some form of intelligence. That is Shapiro’s theory. But back we go to your schizophrenia: you agree that they have some form of intelligence, but you disagree.

How complexification works

DAVID: obviously all levels of brains in size or complexity have the capacity to coordinate into new networks of understanding. It is not just our brain that has complexification ability. I assume it is a mechanism going all the way back to Trilobites.

dhw: I agree. The article basically tells us nothing more than the fact that cells cooperate in finding ways of “understanding”. I would suggest that this is so in all forms of life, including those that do not have brains.

DAVID: Yes, the brainless have some simple controls.

More good news that ties in with your increasingly positive view of Shapiro’s theory.

The origin of a nervous system

QUOTES: The study shows that the Shaker family of ion channels were present in microscopic single cell organisms well before the common ancestor of all animals and thus before the origin of the nervous system.

"It seems that animals were able to cobble together a functioning nervous system very early in their evolution simply because most of the necessary proteins were already there.'"

DAVID: This story of evolution of nerves is quite reasonable.

I think so too. Yet again, it would seem that right from the start, single cells contained the components necessary for evolution. One might therefore rewrite the second quote: it would seem that cells were able to cobble together a functioning nervous system, as well as every other system which eventually evolved into us and our fellow animals.

Symbiotic controls (back to “theodicy”)

dhw: We need the bacteria that help us. Unfortunately, there are also bacteria that make us ill or kill us, but that is another subject.

DAVID: Yes, a side effect of their importance.

dhw: Back to theodicy, and your God who knew he had created bacteria to kill us, but we should ignore them because God is perfect so we should shut our eyes to anything nasty which might be his fault. […]

DAVID: I raised the issue for full discussions we have had.

You did indeed, and you have repeated your conclusion that the answer to how an all-good God can create bad is to ignore the bad.

Natural killer cells

QUOTES: a 2017 study showed that tumors can avoid being killed by triggering the release of transforming growth factor beta (TGFb), a molecule that can turn NK cells into intermediate type 1 innate lymphoid cells (intILC1).

“'Tumors have developed these fantastic environments to survive…”

DAVID: It is amazing to me that such specific proteins create specific functions as the intent of their biochemical reactions. Only design can do this.

dhw: Are you telling us that your God deliberately designed tumors so that they could survive and kill us?

DAVID: Cancers are mistakes in the system. I was presenting immune system ways of fighting them.

The article you presented introduced the ways in which tumors can resist the immune system’s efforts to kill them. And you emphasized that these must have been designed. I presume you meant by God.