New Miscellany 1 &:2: bio, evolution, intelligence, eco (General)

by dhw, Monday, May 12, 2025, 09:10 (8 days ago) @ David Turell

The smelly hoatzin

dhw: Wrong attribution. You apply the terms messy, cumbersome and inefficient to your God, who designed and culled 99.9 out of 100 species that were irrelevant to his one and only purpose. You have now added the hoatzin to the list of survivors. Why do you think your God designed this weird bird?

DAVID: Usual answer: part of a necessary ecosystem.

Usual question: necessary for what? For our existence and food? Your own comment was “a best example of an inefficient, cumbersome evolutionary system”. It could hardly be inefficient if the stinky bird was necessary!

Immune responses

DAVID: Not all antibodies are perfect defenses all the time. Organisms do build a library of antibodies over a lifetime.

dhw: So how does this make immune responses “formulaic” if each new challenge creates a new volume to be added to the library? Once again: every new challenge will require a new response, and this in turn will require the intelligent processing of the new information, followed by a decision on how best to counter the threat.

DAVID: If A is made just as B is made it is a formulaic system.

All evolutionary adaptations and innovations entail changes to the structure of cell communities. So you might just as well say the whole of evolution is a “formulaic system”. How does that prove that the changes are not organized by intelligence – in your case that of your God, and in Shapiro’s that of the cells (though I add that their intelligence may have been designed by your God)?

Evolution and intelligence

dhw: You wrote:”All prey animals think, as can all predators.” The possum is a prey animal. You believe it can think, but you believe it can’t think how to defend itself. What do you think it can think about, if not its own survival?

DAVID: All animals think about survival but not conceptually.

What does that mean? One day, Pete the possum sees Willy wolf sniff a dead possum and walk away, so next time he sees the wolf, he plays dead. Is this less likely than your God popping down to Planet Earth in order to teach the possum how to play dead?

How bacteria control phages

DAVID: Animals have autonomous thought. (dhw: Apart from the poor old possum and presumably the weaverbird!) All bacteria do is edit their DNA.

dhw: They edit their DNA in order to counter new threats and to ensure their own survival, which even you have agreed many times requires autonomous intelligence.

DAVID: OR intelligent guides.

Did your God give them instructions on coping with every new threat for the rest of life’s history? Even your “or” is an advance on your outright dismissal of the possibility.

Mind and cosmos

DAVID: The theory is we use His consciousness structure to form our consciousness.

dhw: How about putting it a different way: if he exists, he has provided our cells with consciousness? Doesn’t that make more sense?

DAVID: Consciousness requires a brain of neurons.

dhw: This is even more confusing, but very illuminating, since you keep referring to the consciousness of NDE patients who have lost the use of their brain of neurons. But I was responding to your theory that we use God’s consciousness to form our own, as opposed to the theory that your God may have given us part of his consciousness.

DAVID: I don't know which is correct, but view our consciousness as a separate gift apart from our physical body.

A “gift” confirms my “different way” (= given by your God), but it still leaves you in total confusion, since “consciousness requires a brain of neurons” and yet is apart from our physical body. Since when was our brain of neurons not a part of our physical body?

Theoretical origin of life

dhw:[…] You ridicule your God for his inefficiency. Do you wish him to be inefficient? Of course you don’t. Your wish is that your illogical theory, whereby we plus food are his sole purpose, were the truth, but it can only be true if your God is inefficient.

DAVID: That God's use of evolution is inefficient is a human viewpoint, certainly not God's.

And the human who has created this viewpoint is you. I very much doubt that there are many of your fellow believers who would agree with you. Even an agnostic like me finds the idea of an omnipotent but inefficient God pretty absurd.

eco-disaster

DAVID: Fools' logic! Fossil fuels will never be stopped in use.

dhw: I really can’t see why it’s fool’s logic to advocate the practical approach I have outlined, and I’m afraid I do not have much faith in your gift of prophecy. “Never”? How about a hundred/thousand/ten thousand years from now (if humans are still around)?

DAVID: No. I guess I skipped it. Fossil fuels always.

Let’s meet up in, say, the year 3025, and see who’s right.