More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, October 12, 2024, 13:23 (6 days ago) @ David Turell

Cancer and cellular autonomy

dhw: So cells make their own decisions. Now you know why I drag Shapiro into the discussion.

DAVID: Only cancer!!!

dhw: I thought that was just “one of the warts that had to exist”.

DAVID: The study was about cancer abilities.

So now you believe that your God gave only cancer cells the intelligence to do their own designing, but all other cells follow his instructions. Which means that cancer cells are cleverer than God, because they often prove the inadequacy of his instructions. Why do you think he gave them their special, autonomous intelligence?

God’s purposes for creating life

dhw: There are no obvious purposes. You love the word “entertainment”, but the terms you used […] are “enjoyment” and “interest”. […] Why do you now think this is unreasonable and “humanizing”?

DAVID: Your God's desires are human desires. Can't you see that?

dhw: Why should we wish that God would enjoy creating? (Interest, I agree, could be our wish.) But you have accepted the feasibility of your other proposals, too - including his desire to be worshipped: “all my ‘earlier proposals’ still apply.” And the possibility that the Creator has endowed his creations with attributes of his own does not mean he is a human being.

DAVID: Not His attributes but His suggestions He wants entertainment and needs to have fun experimenting.

dhw: The other phrase you used was thought patterns and emotions. I think these would cover your belief that he enjoys creating, is interested in his creations, and wants to be worshipped; and they would also cover my proposals that he might like to experiment in order to achieve a particular goal or in order to learn new things and make new discoveries, as would also apply to a free-for-all. […]

DAVID: Your 'explanations' are all humanizing.

As you have rightly pointed out, sharing human-like thought patterns and emotions does not make your dog human, and does not make your God human either.

Kinesins

DAVID: God provided both design and functional information in the genome.

dhw: That is your theory, which I neither accept nor reject. It doesn’t exclude the theory of cellular intelligence […]

DAVID: You have distorted cellular intelligence all out of shape. The intricacies of biochemical design require the mental capacity of a thinking mind! Could mere cells do that? IMPOSSIBLE!!

With my theist’s hat on, I see no reason why your omnipotent God could not have designed the intricacies of cellular intelligence. Plenty of scientists back the theory, you repeatedly admit that cellular behaviour “looks” intelligent, and occasionally you even allow odds of 50/50. That’s good enough for me.

The Avalon Explosion

QUOTES: They were very much unlike any of the organisms that roamed our planet after the Cambrian Explosion and certainly did not represent the ancestors of the Cambrian bilaterian animal phyla.

"There is zero causal explanation for the astonishing culmination in the appearance of the totally new types of organisms that characterize these assemblages. […] While evolutionary biology has no explanation even according to the authors themselves, intelligent design theory does uniquely provide a causally adequate explanation [...]."

DAVID: firstly, clear gaps that have never been filled in. Secondly, his other point is quite clear, that favorable conditions are not drivers of innovations. That is the province of DNA actions.

Firstly, this again refutes your absurd theory that 99.9% of all species were our ancestors. Secondly, it raises the obvious question of why your God bothered to design all these dead ends if he only wanted to design us plus food. Thirdly, I don’t understand the logic regarding conditions. Why did all these species go extinct if there were no changes in conditions, and why did the Cambrian period produce new phyla if conditions had not changed? We go back to the logic of extinctions. Changing conditions must always be a crucial factor for extinction and for innovation: they are what triggers the processes of destruction and activation.

Magic embryology: from initial chaos

QUOTE: cells tend to stick more and more together and this seemingly simple process actually drives the embryo through successive rearrangements to the most optimal packing. It's like embryos solve their own Rubik's cube.

Pretty intelligent of them!

"Without chaos, there is no structure; one needs the other. Both are essential parts of what constitutes 'normal' development.”

“Randomness seems to be a primary force in the generation of complexity in the living world.”

DAVID: The hyperbole of 'chaos' in the article is overreach for emphasis. The embryo is following a blueprint which involves some chaotic-like appearances. The process is highly controlled.

I had the same feeling. Striving for some sort of striking paradox just for effect.

Far out cosmology

DAVID:It shows how gravity is the magic sculptor of these massive structures. And it comes back to dhw's wonderment-questioning about the universe's enormous size and structure. He asks why God made it so big if we humans are His purpose.

Yes indeed, and there seems to be no answer.