More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 19:49 (22 days ago) @ dhw

Cancer and cellular autonomy

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

dhw: 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.

You see cancer cells that out-think God? No! they become free to subvert God's instructions and use them for their own survival.

Sponges collect molybdenum (leading to ecosystem importance)

dhw: 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?

God chose evolution over 3.8 billion years. The result is humans and their necessary resources.

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.

dhw: 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.”

Try this: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05707.x

dhw: 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.

All Shapiro showed was that bacteria can edit DNA as needed. You extrapolate as desired!