More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 31, 2024, 09:42 (15 hours, 42 minutes ago) @ David Turell

Is there consciousness in fetus?

DAVID: [...] at what point does a fetus or young child become aware that he is aware, a true definition of consciousness.

dhw: […]. A “true” definition in my view would be “awareness”, not “awareness of awareness”, but then what’s the definition of “awareness”? I like the comment in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy: “Consciousness exists, but it resists definition. There are some criteria for saying of some organism or state that it is conscious.” […]

DAVID: I like what you found.

Thank you. It’s an important agreement against the background of the theory that cells are intelligent.

DAVID: Based upon NDE reports, consciousness can separate from the brain and return to it. This means a material brain creates an immaterial consciousness which becomes a separate entity. In religious thought it is a soul which can live for eternity. At this point we have left factual knowledge and entered the realm of belief and faith.

dhw: I really like this summary. It represents a kind of compromise between materialism and dualism, but you have presented it with admirable neutrality! Thank you.

DAVID: You are welcome.

Again worth preserving against the background of dualism versus materialism.

Moroccan fossils

dhw: […] What crucial gap does it fill? It’s pretty obvious that different hominins and homos appeared in different environments. Even today we can see that sapiens have appeared with different racial characteristics, again depending on which part of the world they inhabit or once inhabited. [...]

DAVID: Bechly thinks most odd homo fossils are all variants on the way to H. sapiens.

Or they could themselves be variants of H. sapiens.

Cancer and cellular autonomy

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

They out-think him if they follow his instructions in ways he didn't intend -unless he wanted us killed! I think your statement that “cancer cells act autonomously” makes more sense, and is less insulting to your God, if “autonomously” means independently, through decisions of their own making.

ecosystem importance)

dhw: […] 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?

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

And your purposeful God’s possible purpose for designing and culling the millions of organisms and ecosystems unconnected with us and our resources was….???

Another eukaryote article

QUOTE: "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".

dhw: […] 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. […] 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.”

I followed this with a quote from a recent essay on the same subject:
The Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)

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

It wouldn’t open. But whatever it says won’t change the fact that the theory has plenty of scientific support.

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

Shapiro extrapolated his theory from his own research and that of others in various fields. You yourself have even quoted others.

Evolution Without natural selection

Quotes:[…’ if the only materialist theory accounting for the nature of things is discredited, this in good logic leaves only supra-natural causation on the table. (David’s bold)

“What Darwin had meant to say, Lyell proposed, was natural preservation (which is wholly unpremeditated and in essence merely a statistic without creative power)[/b].” (David’s bold)

As Richard Milner has commented, “Natural selection is an eliminative process that does not explain the generation, proliferation and direction of varieties.(David’s bold)

DAVID: the second and third bolds above is the position we have established here. Natural selection has no design capacity. It is a result of the struggle to survive. The first bold is my position. Why not design and its designer?

We agree that natural selection creates nothing. “Preservation” versus “selection” is a matter of terminology, not scientific fact. Neil Thomas would be on safer ground if he attacked the theory of random mutations, but he never mentions it! A second alternative, is Shapiro’s theory (backed by many scientists) that cells are intelligent entities, capable of designing their own innovations. This theory removes randomness, in no way invalidates what Darwin meant by “natural selection”, or his all-important theory of common descent, or supra-natural causation”. (As an agnostic, Darwin never excluded the supra-natural anyway.)