More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 24, 2024, 09:32 (28 days ago) @ David Turell

Cancer and cellular autonomy

DAVID: In general cells act automatically under God's instructions for all needs. Cells cannot.

dhw: “In general” allows for some with autonomy, as you illustrate with cancer cells. “Cells cannot” is your opinion. Many scientists disagree.

DAVID: Name any studying cancer use of DNA to support you. I can't.

We are discussing the autonomous intelligence of cells. You wrote: “Cancer cells are rebels…They act autonomously as rebels.”

What did you mean if you didn’t mean that cancer cells act autonomously?

Biochemical controls

DAVID:[…] We invite the bugs in to help us but it is not a one-way event. We must carefully screen both the bacteria and what they produce.

dhw: I don’t know why you say “we”. I don’t invite bugs, and I don’t screen anything. The quote informs me that some cells pass on information about different foreign substances, and other cells decide what to do about them. It all sounds very much like intelligent cooperation between different members of the cell community.

DAVID: You do invite, like it or not. We all do.

An invitation is something you issue consciously. I can assure you that I have never invited a bug to help me, or screened the bacteria. Clearly these processes and many others take place inside me without my being aware of them (until something goes wrong), so it’s seems pretty clear that it’s the cells and the bugs that know what is going on.

Sponges collect molybdenum (leading to ecosystem importance)

dhw: Why would your God have to preprogramme/dabble such relationships in order to design us plus our food?

DAVID: You miss the entire concept of ecosystems providing what humans need.

Ecosystems provide what is needed by all the organisms within that system, and ecosystems change according to what organisms are alive at the time. I really can’t believe that your God designed every organism and ecosystem for 3+ billion years to provide what humans would need when they arrived, and I find it equally difficult to believe that every single organism and ecosystem on this earth has been designed for the same purpose. Were the extremophiles, the weaverbird’s nest, the sponges etc. all specially designed to provide us with our needs?

dhw: You agree that we and our food are not descended from 99.9% of creatures that ever lived, but only from 0.1%, and yet you think every past species and ecosystem was created for the sole purpose of creating us and our food, although your God may not have had any purpose at all! Total confusion!

DAVID: Sorry you are confused.

A possibly purposeless God who purposefully creates humans, who probably/possibly has human thought patterns but is not human in any way, who may want to be worshipped but can’t want to be worshipped because he is selfless, but possibly can want to be worshipped because all our proposals are possible, and who may have designed the weaverbird’s nest for no reason at all but designed it because along with millions of other natural wonders it provides us with what we need……Yes, I find it all confusing.

Giant impact 3.2 bya

QUOTES:"'We think of impact events as being disastrous for life, but what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on," Drabon says. "These impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish." (David’s bold)

(Re Chixculub) "Even that devastating impact – the only meteorite we've confidently linked to an extinction event – opened new avenues for life to thrive. With the decline of the non-avian dinosaurs, mammals rose to fill the vacated ecological niches; without that devastation, it's possible that humanity would never have emerged.”

This confirms the point that evolution proceeds in phases, and the example given in the second quote illustrates how new conditions enable the survivors of each phase to flourish (the 0.1% who create what David calls the ”continuum”). Raup says it was all luck, and Stephen Jay Gould reckoned that if evolution was rerun, it would have produced different results because so much depended on chance. (Gould was an agnostic. I don’t know about Raup.) If David’s theory of evolution is correct, and humans were the goal from the very beginning, this really does seem a very roundabout way for an omnipotent God to achieve his goal.

Theoretical origin of life: deep ocean vents extremophiles

QUOTE:'To our knowledge, it is the first time that animal life has been discovered in the ocean crust…”

Yet another major discovery. I don’t know what light it is supposed to shed on origin of life, but it remains a source of wonderment how organisms (cell communities) find ways of adapting themselves to the most extreme conditions. I am at a loss as to how anyone can believe that every single one was specially designed to evolve into humans and our food. The whole history of life on Earth – whether there is a God or not – suggests that it has been one colossal free-for-all, with interaction between cellular intelligence (possibly designed by a God) and the environment as the driving force.