More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, October 14, 2024, 20:39 (3 days ago) @ dhw

Cancer and cellular autonomy

DAVID: They are the same instructions that run us! Cancer cells are rebels.

dhw: What are they rebelling against if they are following your God’s instructions?

They use God's perverted instructions to attack normal cells.

God’s purposes for creating life

DAVID: Nice sidestep. I brought up your God's human desires and you switch to my suggestions.

dhw; I have pointed out that your suggestions are no less human than mine, and neither yours nor mine turn him into a human being. If you think mine do but yours don’t, then once more you are flaunting your double standards.

Once more: your God's desires are very humanizing and you seem blind to it. I am not frightened by your invented accusations of dreaded double standards. Only pure thinking agnostics don't have it.

Kinesins

DAVID: Direct design is straight forward!! Teaching cells is two-step design.

dhw: Giving cells the ability to do their own designing is not “teaching”! It is a single invention. Your God does each design himself or teaches cells through “instructions” for every eventuality, and every failure is your God’s. In mine, the mistakes are made by the cells.

As evolution is purposeful, cells must be directed to that goal. No, in my system the cells' molecules make the mistakes,

Far out cosmology

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

dh: But he/she has no idea why. […]

DAVID: We don't need 'why'.

dhw: Back to plausibility, which is all we can hope for. If there are facts which raise questions about your “inventions”, it is no defence to tell us to ignore them!

I am willing to accept that only God knows why. It is called 'belief'.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: All that is needed is built-in instructions

dhw: In your theory, your God has to provide instructions for every speciation, strategy, lifestyle, and problem that ever existed. How about “all that is needed is a single mechanism to enable all cells to make their own decisions”? That would also explain the mistakes and extinctions for which you must otherwise blame your all-powerful, all-knowing God.

The cells' free-floating molecules make the mistakes. God doesn't. That issue is quite clear.

Origin of life: more fun in the lab

dhw: It’s wonderful to hear of all this research that’s going on, but it’s shocking to hear the inflationary and illogical claims of the researchers.

QUOTE: With the preformed DNA added, the researchers noticed something approaching natural selection, which could explain how simple molecules were plucked out of the ooze and chosen to start the beginnings of life: structures that can move, sustain themselves, self-replicate, and adapt to their environment.

dhw: They must be joking! Natural selection never plucked anything out of anything and never chose anything that would start a process!!! Natural selection simply means that whatever already exists and is useful will naturally be preserved, but anything that is not useful will naturally disappear!

QUOTE: The next question is how these DNA templates or strands might have come into being. That's a topic for a future study, but the researchers are investigating several ideas about how this structure for self-assembly could have appeared. (David’s bold)

dhw: I admire your self-restraint. They are congratulating themselves on having got precisely nowhere, beyond kidding themselves that natural selection, which never created anything, can actively choose, assemble and give life to the various parts of the body.

Thank you. I produce this stuff as a lesson in true thought, not the OOL propaganda.