New Miscellany: more on fine-tuning (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 20, 2025, 19:21 (14 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You have it backwards as usual. All necessary fine-tuning factors are known. If they are present, life is allowed to appear. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO APPEAR TO MAKE/PROVE THE POINT.

dhw: 1) All necessary fine-tuning factors are not known. Nobody knows how life originated!

The discussion has nothing to do with origin of life. This universe is a life allowing place to begin with.

dhw: If all factors were known, we would be able to create living organisms out of inanimate matter in the laboratory.

Wrong set of factors! The theory does not include origin of life!

dhw: ....... 4) I find it doubly surprising that someone who believes his God’s one and only purpose was to create us and our food, also believes – as you go on to tell us – that given the right environment, life can pop up anywhere! But your version of a God has never been one for logical behaviour, has he?

It is you who are illogical. Fine-tuning allows life to appear anywhere, nothing more. Fine tuning factors do not make life.

DAVID: You demand a proof that is not necessary. Everywhere fine-tuning factors exists life can appear in the right environmental conditions.

dhw: But (a) fine-tuning factors do not exist everywhere, and (b) life “can” appear does not mean that life does appear, and (c) once more: the only place we know of in which all fine-tuning factors ARE present and life HAS appeared is Planet Earth. Stop fabricating silly rules about unproven hypotheses. Once more: ONLY IF WE FIND LIFE CAN WE SAY THAT SOMEWHERE IS FINE-TUNED FOR LIFE. Please explain why you find this statement illogical.

This life allowing universe cannot exist unless physical factors adjusted just-so are set up within it. It is a unique universe. Leslie concludes it is either God making it the one or there are multiverses, with no evidence for them.

Bird brains

QUOTES: "The genetic tools they use to establish their cellular identity vary from species to species, each exhibiting new and unique cell types."

“Our studies show that evolution has found multiple solutions for building complex brains," explains Dr. García-Moreno. bbb"Birds have developed sophisticated neural circuits through their own mechanisms, bbbwithout following the same path as mammals.”

dhw: Evolution does not find anything. Evolution is a process, not an agent. The emphasis is always on how cells/cell communities develop or change their functions as they respond in their different ways to the conditions they are exposed to. You will no doubt tell us that every variation was divinely planned 3.8 billion years ago, or dabbled ad hoc. Shapiro suggests that all such changes are made by intelligent cells/cell communities that work out their own solutions (if they are clever enough – otherwise, they go extinct). You and I both reject Darwin’s theory of random mutations. Of the three explanations, I must confess I find Shapiro’s by far the most convincing, and to forestall your usual objection, his theory does not exclude your God, who may have designed the intelligent cell in the first place.

DAVID: Cells are not intelligent enough to design a new type of organism.

dhw: Yes, I know you prefer your theory of ad hoc divine dabbles or the first cells being provided with 3.8000,000,000 years’ worth of instructions.

DAVID: And you have your brilliant cell committees.

dhw: I don’t dislike your “committees” image, though I would never use it. Virtually every article on cellular behaviour that you present to us draws attention to the manner in which cells/cell communities communicate and cooperate with one another as they process new information and decide how to handle it. But they don’t sit round a table sipping their pints of beer.

DAVID: No, they automatically communicate.

dhw; What does that mean? One set of cells is programmed to quote your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old instructions to other sets? Or God pops in and tells one set what to tell the other sets?

No popping. All automatic from the beginning. LUCA indicates it:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535311-100-when-did-life-begin-on-earth-new-ev...

"...genetics points to an early origin. In a study published in July 2024, Donoghue and his colleagues attempted to date the last universal common ancestor (LUCA): the organism that is the ancestor of all life today. They did so by identifying genes found in all living organisms, which probably date back to LUCA. Their best estimate was that LUCA lived 4.2 billion years ago. That’s just 300 million years after Earth formed. And things would have got started far earlier than that. “LUCA isn’t the origin of life by any stretch of the imagination,” says Donoghue. It seems to have been a fairly advanced microorganism, the product of a long period of evolution and growing complexity."

All we can predict is complexity al the way back.