Miscellaneous (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 11, 2024, 09:36 (11 days ago) @ David Turell

Cellular intelligence: renal cell memory

DAVID: Life is not perfect as produced by God. Death is an expected outcome. No one lives forever.

dhw: You keep repeating the obvious and ignoring the point at issue, just as you do when we discuss theodicy. Yes, death, suffering and evil are all REAL. In the context of this particular discussion, you tell us that in order to repel invaders, cells automatically obey your God’s instructions. I point out that cells frequently fail to repel invaders, so what does that tell us about your God’s instructions? Then you dodge and doge and dodge. But you said that cells have the ability to change when required, which could suggest that their ability has nothing to do with instructions, and refers solely to their autonomous ability to process information and make decisions on what actions to take. Sometimes THEY will get it wrong. THEY are not supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent.

DAVID: No dodge. You have simply concluded with my point. Death is expected to happen. Expectedly the instructions will not be adequate.

A wonderful tribute to your God’s efficiency! We ought to know that when your omnipotent, omniscient God issues instructions, they may fail. But you won’t consider the possibility that the fault may lie in the cells themselves.

LUCA

DAVID: You still skip over what evolution produced: us a huge numbers and all the living resources on Earth for our use. Yes God culled, as a normal part of any evolution, but what is here is all necessary to be here for us.

dhw: You accuse me of ignoring the biochemistry. I give you a complete response, and so you ignore it and change the subject back to one that has already been demolished time after time: current numbers are descended from the 0.1% survivors out of the 100% that ever existed, 99.9% of which were irrelevant to us and our food. Even the fact that we use whatever resources are here does mean that we would die without them. Many are useful, but not necessary. Now please explain why your perfect God had to create and cull 99 out of 100 species that were irrelevant to the purpose you impose on him. If you can’t, then please say so and stop changing the subject.

DAVID: Culling is part of any form of evolution producing useful results. It is time you accepted that point. Nothing is/was irrelevant.

Something is only irrelevant if it has no connection with a particular subject/purpose. In your case, the subject/purpose is us and our food, and 99 out of 100 species did not lead to us and our food. Extinctions and subsequent new species that can cope with the new conditions are the only form of evolution that we know. Your Raup says it all hinges on luck. You say it all hinges on the messy inefficiency of your God. I offer alternatives which you refuse to consider.

What does the universe expand into?

DAVID: so we are left with the concept that the universe expands into itself. There is nothing out there to expand into. Wow! In creating the universe God has left us with puzzles. Not just that the basis of our universe is quantum mechanics.

dhw: If 95% (approx.) of the universe consists of dark matter, and 68% of dark energy – i.e. matter and energy we know nothing about – how do we know WHAT is the basis of our universe? An atheist would argue that in creating God, humans have left us with even more puzzles than a godless universe. We agnostics simply confess that we are puzzled, though that needn’t stop us from looking for clues. Hence this website!

DAVID: Good summary of the puzzle.

Thank you.

ID view of natural selection

QUOTE: Whenever materialism cannot come up with any empirically verifiable explanation, it invokes natural selection.

DAVID: natural selection is a worthless tautology.

Talk about flogghg a dead horse. In the first edition of my brief guide (2007), I pointed out that “Dawkins blithely announces that natural selection ‘explains the whole of life’”, and throughout the history of this website one thing you and I have always agreed on is that natural selection never created anything. It’s simply a useful expression to explain why some species survive and some don’t – according to their ability to cope with existing conditions. It’s not a tautology (which means saying the same thing twice) but perhaos you might call it a truism: those who survive are those who are best equipped to survive. But for me the basic flaws in Darwin’s theory are his reliance on the creativity of random mutations, and his insistence that nature never jumps. The basic truth of the theory (in my opinion) is that of common descent, and it would have been fascinating to know what he might have thought of Shapiro’s theory, which replaces random mutations with cellular intelligence.