New Miscellany 2: intelligent cells, design (General)

by dhw, Friday, May 30, 2025, 12:45 (3 days ago) @ dhw

Under “Clever corvids”

DAVID: Our cells only look conscious.

dhw: They look conscious, they act conscious, but you know they ain’t conscious.

DAVID: Do you know they are? It can all be intelligent programming.

dhw: Nobody knows. But you insist that they can’t possibly be intelligent. I accept that intelligence is still an unproven theory, but I find it far more convincing than your own theory that your God preprogrammed every response 3.8 billion years ago, or popped in to give courses and /or perform operations.

DAVID: Yes, it is my God, not yours.

I understand, but when I try to link this theory with your other theory that throughout life’s history, 99.9% of his preprogramming and dabbling had nothing to do with his sole purpose, and when you argue that, for instance, the possum’s strategy of feigning death could only be God’s work – and presumably is essential for the survival of us humans – I simply cannot find any logic in your arguments. I’m sorry.

Cells controlling the gut

DAVID: dhw will tell us how intelligent the T cells are. This is a complex mechanism to control satiety, a very important function to halt overeating. It needs a designer not natural evolution.

You love to use the word “natural”, by which I presume you mean that your God plays no part. This is an enormous leap. You know perfectly well that I can accept the argument that your God might be the designer of cellular intelligence. If so, what could be more “natural” than cells using their God-given intelligence to design their own modes of survival? And what could be more natural than some cell communities being unable to cope with changing conditions, whereas some can by adapting themselves or designing new ways of using the new conditions? Doesn’t that sound more feasible and less insulting than your version of evolution as an inefficient process controlled by a God who knows he’s messing things up and has to get rid of 99.9% of his designs?

More astrocyte studies

QUOTE: “'There’s specificity to [astrocytes] being able to turn on and off the different knobs,” Guttenplan says. “It has effects on [neural] circuits as well as on whole animal behavior.”

DAVID: The final point of the article tells us do not ignore any facet of an organism. From a design standpoint everything we see is there for a reason.

dhw: Of course it is. That is central to the theory of evolution – that whatever is useful will survive – and I agree with you completely that it denotes design. What it also denotes is a) how much all brains from fruit flies, zebra fish and mice to us human beings have in common, and b) the complex communications between the different cells and their influence on behaviour. The first of these provides yet more evidence for common descent, while the second seems to me to provide yet more evidence that cells and cell communities use their own intelligence, as they combine and communicate in making the decisions that influence behaviour. From a design standpoint, this makes perfect sense, as does the argument that such a complex mechanism itself must have been designed – which we may take as evidence for the existence of a designer God.

DAVID: Thank you.

It’s a basic reason, together with inexplicable psychic phenomena, for my remaining agnostic. You already know the counterbalancing reasons why I cannot embrace theism.