New Miscellany 1: evol, intelligence, consciousness (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 18, 2025, 22:24 (1 day, 20 hours, 22 min. ago) @ dhw

The smelly hoatzin

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DAVID: What else is evolving into new species? Nothing. Evolution is over for anything new.

dhw: As usual, you are trying to steer the discussion away from the absurdity of your God’s strangely efficient inefficiency, as epitomized – according to you – by the hoatzin, “the best example” of your God’s inefficiency. Whether evolution has ended is a totally different subject. I have agreed that our own species is unlikely to evolve into anything else, but it is perfectly conceivable that within the next few thousand or million or billion years some major natural or even man-made catastrophe could totally change the Earth’s atmosphere, which in turn would wipe out some species but result – as has always happened after major extinctions – in the formation of new ones.

Your absurd complaint about God's use of evolution has exhausted its usefulness for discussion and is not worth any response. Your usual retreat into thousands or millions of years tells us nothing concrete. We can only know the present: no new evolution of new species.

Animal minds: Insect tool use

dhw: You accept insect intelligence, but you need to test the insect to see if it is or isn't intelligent. But you never contradict yourself, do you?

DAVID: I think they look intelligent, but need testing for proof.

dhw: And yet on Thursday it was your stated position that you accepted insect intelligence. In any case, ants have passed all kinds of intelligence tests set by humans, and ants are insects.

Yes, ants which may be a special case.

Mind and cosmos

dhw: My theistic proposal that he invented cellular intelligence is how you think about God, but that is not how you think about God.

DAVID: Carefully coded cells look intelligent because the coding is from an intelligence.

dhw: Disregarding your self-contradiction, perhaps I should reiterate what I see as the overall pattern. Yes, different cells serve different functions as required by their community (“carefully coded”), and most will behave automatically so long as they are working under normal conditions. If they stopped performing their allocated function, there would be no stability. This is what you seize on, while conveniently forgetting that when conditions change, cells/cell communities must also make changes, either of adaptation (same species) or of innovation (new species), or they will die. It is the changes that manifest cellular intelligence. But you attribute all the changes to your God’s preprogramming or intervention, with the 99.9% death rate the result of his inefficiency, made all the more damaging to his image by the fact that he designed them while knowing they were irrelevant to his purpose.

Reiterating your usual mantra as above. All evolutions have loss of forms as part of the natural culling process. You must have forgotten this point.