More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, November 01, 2024, 08:35 (20 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Subverting God's instructions to survive does not insult God. There is lots of freedom of action in the biochemistry of life.

I should have picked up on “subvert” first time. Previously you wrote: “They are free to use God’s instructions as they wish.” Using is not the same as subverting. If God’s instructions allow them to kill us, and God does not want them to kill us, then of course his instructions are at fault, which even you would find hard to reconcile with your image of his perfection.

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.

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

DAVID: Unknown. He chose to evolve us but we cannot know why.

And you believe he chose to design and then destroy countless other organisms and ecosystems that had no connection with us, and you can’t think of a single reason why, but he must have had a reason, although “why must he have a reason?” (See the evolution thread for the rest of the muddle.)

Another eukaryote article

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

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

DAVID: OK

Thank you. I hope we shall never hear this anti-Shapiro argument again.

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).” (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?

dhw: 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.)

DAVID: Survival is the real point, not natural selection.

It’s one of the real points. May I offer a summary? Evolution is driven by organisms improving their chances of survival by changes made in response to new conditions. These may be adaptations or innovations. Natural selection is simply the process whereby some organs/organisms can and some cannot survive in the new conditions. The means whereby the changes take place are unknown. Darwin proposed random mutations, you propose God preprogramming or dabbling, and Shapiro proposes cellular intelligence.

Spliceosome architecture

QUOTE: You have many dozens of editors going through the material and making rapid decisions on whether a scene makes the final cut. It's an astonishing level of molecular specialization at the scale of big Hollywood productions, but there's an unexpected twist. Any one of the contributors can step in, take charge, and dictate the direction. Rather than the production falling apart, this dynamic results in a different version of the movie. It's a surprising level of democratization we didn't foresee,

Although generally the “film” will remain the same, or no species would be stable, this autonomous decision-making by individuals (even at molecular level) can presumably also result in adaptations and innovations as well as diseases and death. It all sounds remarkably like a free-for-all – and of course if God exists, he would have designed it as such.