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

by dhw, Wednesday, May 14, 2025, 13:40 (6 days ago) @ David Turell

The smelly hoatzin

dhw: [..] Why do you think your God designed this weird bird?

DAVID: Usual answer: part of a necessary ecosystem.

dhw: […] Your own comment was “a best example of an inefficient, cumbersome evolutionary system”. It could hardly be inefficient and cumbersome if the stinky bird was necessary!

DAVID: All ecosystems form the fabric of life on Earth. They are all closely integrated, and all are necessary to maintain this fabric. You are seemingly blind to this principle.

What is the “fabric” of life? Life’s history is one of ever changing ecosystems with ever changing forms of life, and this vague generalization of yours simply ignores your absurd theory that your omnipotent God inefficiently designed every single econiche and species for the sole purpose of creating us humans and our food, and 99.9% of them were NOT necessary, so he culled them. According to you, even the surviving hoatzin is one of your God’s “necessary”mistakes!

Immune responses

DAVID: Immunity through the production of antibodies is a singular process of choosing a part of the enemy to which a killer protein is added.

dhw: And each new enemy requires the production of a new antibody, which often occurs after large numbers of deaths, and in some cases has to be ongoing, since the enemy can also counter antibodies by mutating itself. How does any of this prove that your God organizes every success (and failure), as opposed to the cells themselves doing the job?

DAVID: The cells run on a God design. Yes, God is responsible for success and failure as discussed in our Theodicy thread.

More obfuscation. A “God design” could just as easily be autonomous cellular intelligence as a 3.8-billion-year old book of instructions. Your belief in a God who is omniscient and omnipotent but also so inefficient that he designs failures is a blatant self-contradiction.

Evolution and intelligence

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Your just-so story requires conceptual thought by the possum!!

dhw: I don’t care what kind of thought it is. Did the possum work it out for himself, or did your God pop in to give him lessons?

DAVID: I have assumed God did it.

And yet you assume that “all animals think about survival”. By happy coincidence you have kindly offered us a new article:

Animal minds: Insect tool use

QUOTE: "An insect that harvests and modifies plant resin to snare its prey adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests we may be underestimating the cunning of invertebrate animals.”

I would regard ants as the prime example, but in any case, if invertebrates are “cunning”, it should not be beyond your powers of belief that vertebrates like possums might also be cunning.

DAVID: what is now instinct appears to have developed by conceptualization of a tool's use, the author's assumption. On the other hand, trial and error was a possible method of development. Just as we have tested crows to show they use thinking, we must test the insects in the same way to achieve the same level of certainty. Insect thought would not surprise me.

Don’t you realize that even trial and error requires conscious thought? How else would an organism know what to try and what fails or succeeds? And if insect thought wouldn’t surprise you, why do you categorically reject the possibility that our friends the possum and the weaverbird might also be capable of thinking for themselves?

Mind and cosmos

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: The neurons act a a receiver of consciousness (Van Lommel)

dhw: So consciousness requires a brain of neurons except when it doesn’t (NDEs), and “we use God’s consciousness structure to form our consciousness”, but “we” only provide a receiver. What part of “us” uses God’s consciousness? I’m still very confused. Why is not possible that your God simply imbued our cells with autonomous consciousness?

DAVID: Discussing at the level of NDE's consciousness can be detached from a non-functioning brain and yet function, as if consciousness is a separate entity the brain receives. Clear?

But our discussion is not confined to NDEs! What you have described was already clear. You are once again dodging the issue of the ORIGIN of consciousness, as above. You say “we use God’s consciousness structure to form our own” and we only provide a receiver. I don’t understand what you mean, and propose instead that your God imbued our cells with autonomous consciousness, which seems to me to be crystal clear. But I fear that you are simply dodging this because you prefer to ridicule your God’s inefficiency rather than accept that our cells might be intelligent.