Miscellaneous (General)

by dhw, Friday, December 13, 2024, 11:49 (9 days ago) @ David Turell

Cellular intelligence: renal cell memory

DAVID: You have simply concluded with my point. Death is expected to happen. Expectedly the instructions will not be adequate.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: No. cell death is coded in when necessary and predators may overcome cell defenses that are present.

So your God issues instructions to cells on how to defend themselves against the nasty bugs, but the instructions include not defending themselves against nasty bugs “when necessary”? It’s amazing that ANY cells survive the threats with all these different instructions floating around. I wonder how your God selects which cells are to obey which sets of instructions, since they themselves are apparently incapable of making any decisions.

LUCA

Your one and only point is dealt with on the “evolution” thread.

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.

dhw: Talk about flogghg a dead horse. In the first edition of my brief guide (2007), I pointed out that bbb“Dawkins blithely announces that natural selection ‘explains the whole of life’”,bbb 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.

DAVID: Darwin would be amazed at our current knowledge and probably join ID.

It would have been interesting to know whether you agree with my summary. But I’m sure Darwin would have welcomed all the new discoveries, and I suspect he would have remained agnostic since we are still no nearer discovering the origin of life.