Miscellaneous (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 27, 2024, 18:12 (4 hours, 39 minutes ago) @ dhw

Different birds build different nests

DAVID: If the weaverbirds have instructions why shouldn't these birds?

dhw: If these birds appear to be able to design their own nests, how do you know they are not? And how do you know the weaverbird is not?

DAVID: Why can't the birds be different? Weaverbirds have strict instructions while the other birds have a looser set of design instruction?

dhw: “Looser”? Your comment was: Not rigid like the weaverbirds, these birds sort of build whatever they wish. It is as if the DNA says build whatever you wish, as long as it is effective.
Wouldn’t you say this means they were given the intelligence to do their own designing?

I would say they were given design guidelines to follow. Much like an architect goes to school and comes out designing buildings.

Theoretical origin of life: Space is filled with organics

dhw: why did he leave them floating around for about 1000,000,000 years, and then use them to create and cull all kinds of life forms, if all he wanted to do was create us and our food?

DAVID: We are here, against all odds, and you have no answer for that.[…]

dhw: If he exists, we don’t know why he chose to evolve the duckbilled platypus, or indeed why he chose to create life at all. How does that justify your ridiculing him as being messy and inefficient?

DAVID: Can you justify evolution as a simple progression to us?

dhw: As usual, you answer a question with a question. I’m not even sure what your question means, but the answer is no, and you can’t either. Evolution is not a simple progression to us, since it produced millions of now extinct species that had no connection with us. That is why it is nonsense to argue that your omnipotent, omniscient God's one and only purpose must have been to design us and our food, and your theory is so illogical that you call your God messy and inefficient. You’d rather ridicule him than admit that your theory might be wrong.

No. I follow Adler's argument that we are a most unusual result of natural evolution, which means we were purposely designed by God. The debate is simply why God chose to evolve us instead of direct creation.

DAVID: The answer is above: "We are so unusual we must be purposely deigned by God, Adler's proof of God. It is a powerful argument you ignore. A free-for-all, by definition has no direction or purpose. Why should we happen to appear against all odds?

dhw: These arguments are demolished on the “evolution” thread. You would rather ridicule your omnipotent, omniscient God for his messy inefficiency than admit that an omnipotent, omniscient God is unlikely to be so inefficient, and therefore it is your theory which may be ridiculous.

Same distortion of the argument I've posed. You have distorted the question as to why God evolved us which is an inefficient method. We don't understand why God chose to do it the way He did, but He obviously had His reasons.

Cellular intelligence: renal cell memory

QUOTES: “we propose that maybe if you give nonbrain cells complicated enough tasks, they will also be able to form a memory.”

"Neuroscientist Ashok Hegde calls the study “interesting, because they are applying what’s generally considered a neuroscience principle sort of broadly to understand gene expression in nonneuronal cells.” But it’s unclear how generalizable the findings are to other kinds of cells.[/b]” (David’s bold)

dhw: It seems that new discoveries are being made every day! Thank you for the heading. Memory, of course, is an essential feature of intelligence, as is the fact that intelligence shows itself when there are new tasks to perform. You think cell behaviour only looks intelligent. I would suggest that cell behaviour only looks automatic when cells are performing their routine duties. Intelligence comes into play when something new is required. I think the bold is fair enough, though. At this stage, we are only dealing with theory.

As I've noted renal cells and liver cells must be able to alter their routines as circunmstances require to maintain the proper balances.