Innovation and Speciation (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, May 23, 2011, 12:06 (4932 days ago) @ David Turell

I'm responding here, not to the "sticky dehydrons" (a useful addition to the causes of complexity) but to the lecture by James Shapiro, which David alerted us to under "Why bother with God?" but which I think needs to be discussed on this thread:-http://vimeo.com/17592530-I couldn't find the lecture, but read the paper instead. Parts of it were far too technical for me, but the following summarizes the argument very succinctly:-This 21st century view of evolution establishes a reasonable connection between ecological changes, cell and organism responses, widespread genome restructuring, and the rapid emergence of adaptive inventions. It also answers the objections to conventional theory raised by intelligent design advocates, because evolution by natural genetic engineering has the capacity to generate complex novelties. In other words, our best defense against anti-science obscurantism comes from the study of mobile DNA because that is the subject that has most significantly transformed evolution from natural history into a vibrant empirical science.-Firstly, you yourself have stated that Shapiro "inputs much more control over changes by individual cells than most scientists have stated." Could it be that you are now coming round to the idea that intelligent cells are the driving force behind evolution?-The paper seems to telescope adaptation and innovation. We know of species that adapt to new conditions but remain the same species. Do we know of species that change into different species through adaptation? If species can survive without eyes, ears, legs, why invent them? To me, the idea only makes sense if there is some kind of inventive (and not just adaptive) intelligence at work, although of course the novelty must function within the given environment. I can well believe that such an intelligence is at work within the genome, and that it has the capacity to "generate complex novelties" which emerge rapidly rather than gradually. How that intelligence came into being in the first place is another matter, and ID advocates can still argue that it takes intelligence to produce intelligence.