More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, October 13, 2024, 09:14 (5 days ago) @ David Turell

Cancer and cellular autonomy

DAVID: The study was about cancer abilities.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: NO. They are rebels using God's instructions to survive. The make His instructions too adequate.

Curiouser and curiouser. Why would your perfect, omniscient God create instructions which he knew would enable nasty cancer cells to destroy nice ordinary cells?

God’s purposes for creating life

DAVID: Your 'explanations' are all humanizing.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: 'Humanizing God' comes from the desires you give Him.

YOU gave him the desires for recognition and worship, and suggested that he enjoys creation and is interested in his creations. Your proposals do not make him a human being, and nor does his possible desire to make new discoveries.

Kinesins

DAVID: […] The intricacies of biochemical design require the mental capacity of a thinking mind! Could mere cells do that? IMPOSSIBLE!!

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Again promoting second-hand design. Telling cells how to do it is much more cumbersome than doing the design yourself.

Why is it more cumbersome to enable cells to do their own designing in a free-for-all than painstakingly designing and having to cull millions of species, 99.9% of which are irrelevant to the designer’s purpose? Why is God doing what he wants to do less efficient than his having to make mistakes he doesn’t want to make?

The Avalon Explosion

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 why your God designed all these dead ends if he only wanted to design us plus food.

DAVID: Two answers one! The 99.9% were not our specific ancestors, but most of the 99.99% produced our current food.

So you agree again that the 99.9% were not our ancestors, but you still blunder along with your 99.9% being ancestors of our food, contradicting your earlier agreement:

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From 0/1% surviving.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Some driver force has to take advantage of new conditions. That is not a trigger, which must act upon new conditions. All if life has built-in triggers,

The evolutionary sequence would generally be: 1) changing conditions; 2) extinction, adaptation and/or innovation. 2) will depend on the efficiency of the mechanisms for survival. You say these are God’s instructions, which fail 99.9% of the time, or he culls the irrelevant 99.9% of species he designed. I propose that – if he exists – he gave cells the mechanisms to work things out for themselves. (Raup’s proposal would mean that 99.9% were unlucky enough to fail the intelligence test.)

Far out cosmology

DAVID: [...] 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.

dhw: Yes indeed, and there seems to be no answer.

DAVID: The believer's answer is God needed it that way.

But he/she has no idea why. It’s like you saying that for some unknown reason he was forced to create a world with problems.

Predicting seasonal change

QUOTE: Even short-lived, single-celled organisms can sense day length and get themselves ready for winter.

DAVID: the anticipation of environmental change is a conceptual idea. Not something a set of cells could anticipate. Pure evidence for design.

The question is one of timing. Exactly when do they start their preparations? Every organism that prepares for winter will “sense” that it is approaching, and act accordingly, with information being passed on from one generation to the next. The quote suggests that bacteria sense the approach according to the length of the day. I don’t see why anticipation based on past experience should be beyond the range of cellular intelligence.