More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 29, 2024, 08:09 (23 days ago) @ David Turell

Cancer and cellular autonomy

dhw: Please […] explain what you meant by “act autonomously” when you wrote that “cancer cells act autonomously”. I thought that meant they made their own decisions.

DAVID: They do using God's DNA instructions.

dhw: This is yet another of your wacky attempts to misuse language. When did “autonomy” ever mean “obeying instructions”?

DAVID: They are free to use God's instructions as they wish.

I see, so God’s instructions allow them to kill us. All part of your perfect, benevolent God’s inefficiency, I suppose. And let us not forget that despite his omnipotence, he is – according to you - unable to correct all the mistakes in his instructions and is relying on us clever humans to help him. I find it a bit surprising that you, who start out with the God you wish for, should wish for such an incompetent designer. At least autonomous, decision-making cells would be less degrading.

Sponges collect molybdenum (leading to ecosystem importance)

DAVID: Yes, all evolved to satisfy our current needs.

dhw: We weren’t even here for 3.X billion years. How could every organism and ecosystem have served our current needs?

DAVID: Now, needs, not then!

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. If his only purpose was to design us and our food, what was the purpose of the millions of organisms and ecosystems that came and went before we were here?

Privileged planet: unmelted asteroids needed

dhw: […] why would your first-cause, omnipotent and omniscient God have to create billions of stars and solar systems and unmelted and melted asteroids, with “a million or more contingencies”, if his one and only purpose was to create us and our food? […] your answer will be that only God knows. But you can’t see that such irrationality demands the same faith as an atheist’s belief that all the billions and millions would eventually chance to produce the right combination of “contingencies”.

DAVID: We are discussing critical contingencies, all of which require perfection. The atheist is following a pipedream.

dhw: And the atheist will no doubt ask the same old question above, which you cannot answer, and will argue that the invention of an unknown, unknowable, immaterial, first-cause conscious being with no source but simply existing forever is a pipedream.

DAVID: But exist He must.

Because that is the wish you start with? Or because you don’t need faith to believe in such an unknown, unknowable and sourceless being?

NDE's and skeptics: Parnia's latest studies

DAVID: The issue is can the consciousness remain separate permanently?

dhw: There are two issues. One is that of materialism versus dualism. There are countless examples of the manner in which the material brain affects the conscious self, every one of which can be cited in defence of materialism, i.e. that the brain is the SOURCE of consciousness. The debate has not been resolved, no matter how strongly you may feel about it. The question of “permanence” refers to an afterlife, in which somehow the conscious self can survive all the material factors that have contributed to its identity, and can live for ever. Either we shall know the answer when we die, or we shall never know the answer!

DAVID: Granted.

I’m glad we agree.

Another eukaryote article

QUOTES: "Then, within the last billion years, some individual eukaryotes began working together. Collectives became colonies, and they further organized when entire cells began to specialize, or perform unique functions within a complex multicellular body. Multicellularity unlocked even higher levels of sophistication, resulting in mushrooms, trees, hippos and humans."

"The process by which an archaean cell turned a free-living bacterium into its own cellular machinery — called endosymbiosis — remains largely obscured by evolutionary history.

DAVID: Somehow all of this got cobbled together or evolved. Perhaps all designed.

You always like to link these articles to “design”, and for you this = your God directly at work. So long as you do this, I feel obliged to offer an alternative, which of course does not exclude God. The process called “endosymbiosis” was Lynn Margulis’s major contribution to our understanding of evolution, and she was a staunch supporter of the concept of cellular intelligence. For some reason, I can’t reproduce the link, but this is the first sentence in an essay she wrote on the subject:

The Conscious Cell

"The evolutionary antecedent of the nervous system is “microbial consciousness.”

Just below this article, I found the following – an essay written by Arthur S. Reber, František Baluška, and William B. Miller in October 2023:

The Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)

QUOTE: This chapter presents the biological foundations for the authors’ position that life and sentience are coterminous, that all (and only) living organisms have a palpable internal, felt, experiential life, that they have valenced sensory inputs, and make appropriate determinations about the impact of the events that occur around and within them—that they are conscious beings.

You have consistently tried to downplay this theory, as if Shapiro is on his own. He is not.