Miscellaneous (General)

by dhw, Monday, December 09, 2024, 15:46 (13 days ago) @ David Turell

Cellular intelligence: renal cell memory

DAVID: You don't understand what I wrote. Cell apoptosis is built into life. When a cell is no longer useful, it is killed. All lives have an end point.

I am not questioning what happens! I am questioning your interpretation of what happens. You are dodging the whole question of what you call your God’s “instructions” in connection with cellular responses to threats from outside. Herewith the exchange that started this discussion:

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

dhw: Thank you for repeating the point I have just made. They have the ability to change when required. That requires intelligence.

DAVID: Or following intelligent instructions.

Now please explain why cells that follow your omniscient, omnipotent God’s instructions sometimes fail to survive.

Fighting off asteroid hits

DAVID: I'm on my own journey with God, not asking for help beyond what Adler has published to guide me. The biochemistry of life requires a 'sourceless' mind.

dhw: I am not disputing the latter as evidence of design. The dispute is over your God’s purposes, methods and nature, and you have made it plain on the “evolution” thread that you have fixed wishes and beliefs, and although you acknowledge that they are”schizophrenic”, part of your schizophrenia is to claim that you never contradict yourself.

DAVID: God's purposes and method are quite clear to produce us. It is His nature where there must be great debates.

God’s purposes and methods are obviously NOT clear since your own interpretation of them leads you to ridicule him as messy and inefficient, whereas I have offered alternative interpretations which allow him to appear perfectly efficient in achieving different purposes from yours, or even the same one.

LUCA

DAVID: {...] My view is that life appeared as engineered by God, just like the Cambrian animals did later on. It only took half a billion years to appear once the earliest Earth had formed.

dhw: As before, the complexity provides good grounds for your belief in a God who did the original engineering. Your belief in his “de novo” engineering of our Cambrian ancestors has led you to one of many contradictions in your refusal to accept that this makes all pre-Cambrian species irrelevant to the single purpose you impose on your God (in those times when your God has a reason for creating life). And our disagreements concern what happened AFTER life appeared.

DAVID: Your refusal to look at the biochemistry of life as a continuum from its beginning is wrong. You look at phenotypical evolution at the simplistic Darwin level. form is not function. Once life is formed, it can have any shape God desires. Thus the Cambrian appears with no form predecessors but with all the necessary life mechanisms in place. The literature is filled with de novo gaps like the Cambrian but of smaller degree.

Of course LUCA must be the original cells from which all life forms have evolved in a continuous process – but the process has been one of diversification! The exact opposite of your theory that the process was meant to head solely towards one species plus its food! It is you who focus on speciation and not on biochemistry, and so it makes no sense to claim that we were its sole purpose! That is why you are at a total loss to explain why your God didn’t create our species directly instead of creating and having to cull 100 out of 100 irrelevant pre-Cambrians, and 99 out of 100 post-Cambrians.