Rapid evolution or epigenetics? (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 05, 2011, 14:36 (5012 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I'm surprised that you link direct drive to a bush form. [...] By direct drive I would understand the shortest possible route.-DAVID: No, the 'bush' comment is due to direct observation. The so-called tree of life is really a bush. Look at it. Why that form? The organisms have epigenetic responses to many threats and respond to them, creating the bush.-A misunderstanding. I'm not disputing the bush pattern. I'm disputing your identification of the bush with a direct drive to what you regard as the end product ... humans. One would have expected pre-planning to be direct, but direct is NOT bush-form. As you rightly pointed out, my proposal (without pre-planning) "automatically will be in bush form". One up, I think, for my proposal.-DAVID: We don't know how those termite activities arose. Possibly invented by the bugs [...] But we also don't know how instinct is carried: is it coded in the DNA? Was it pre-coded? That sounds like a stretch. All the animals in the ant family do this burrowing. Some ancestor started it and it became automatic instinct. -Exactly. It began with an intelligent innovation which was passed on. I'm using this as an analogy for all evolutionary innovations: within the organisms themselves is a mechanism capable of invention, leading to new organs and new species. That mechanism has to be there. The question is whether it's 1) a machine pre-programmed by a UI (your version), 2) has some form of "intelligence" which ... like the ancestral mound-builder ... invents and passes on its invention (my suggestion), or 3) has no "intelligence" of its own and invents solely by way of random mutations (atheist version).
 
DAVID: We literally don't know how this works. Consciousness? No way. It was coded in by epigenetics and carried forward genetically.-As I said before, I don't want to get sidetracked into definitions of intelligence/ consciousness. Just as your UI would be a form of intelligence we don't understand, I'm using the word because we don't have any other. As for epigenetics, it may explain adaptation, but not (so far) innovation.-DAVID: Those [bodily] functions have no relation to consciousness. I don't really know why you related them to the consciousness discussion. They sure suggest design to me.-Another misunderstanding. I quoted the passage about consciousness because of its assumption that insects are unconscious. I used it to draw the analogy described above between the termite mound and the complex structures in our bodies. The outcome of the three "theories" is the same, and of course we're still faced with the problem of the origin of the mechanism, but whether the latter was designed or not, I think my suggestion provides a more convincing explanation of evolution's comings and goings and general meanderings (your bush pattern), and it reduces the Darwinian dependence on chance (the sheer luck of random mutations) for innovations. It is also a challenge to the anthropocentric interpretation of evolution, which may be why you don't like it!