https://bwo.life/bk/principles.htm#p_key

"Humans are a key to evolution. Given that our bodies comprise vast and diverse populations of single cells, ranging from amoeba-like macrophages (white blood cells) to the various cells forming hard bone; given that our lives are deeply integrated with symbiotic microbes whose numbers match or exceed the number of our own cells; given the sophisticated developmental processes that carry us, in one lifetime, from a single-celled zygote to an exceedingly complex and balanced adult form; given the unique evolutionary achievement of our nascent selfhood (Principle #6), along with our consequent ability consciously to take hold of the thought-full and intentional interior of the evolutionary process and not merely be possessed by it; and given a human culture upon which all life and evolution on earth now depends, we are, you might say, the alpha and omega of the evolutionary story. What seems incontrovertible is that we represent the highest and furthest reach9 of the thinking — which is to say, the ideas and meaning — taking form in evolving earthly life." (my bold)

***

"...it is widely accepted that in our day we are witnessing an evolutionary transition whereby the intentional human mind is becoming the primary agent of evolution. This suggests not only a need to recognize the “apex” nature of our minds, but also to accept the ethical responsibility for all life on earth that this implies. (I doubt whether anyone would attribute ethical responsibility to any creature beside humans.) And, moreover, the transition tells us that the ongoing evolution, or self-transformation, of the human interior (that is, the evolutionary agent’s work upon itself) is now the primary task and achievement of evolution. The burden lying upon us is a heavy one.

"If our own interior capacities constitute a growing power consciously to direct evolution toward the future, then we have every reason to suspect that the interior capacities so clearly manifest in every unself-aware organism have likewise given expression — albeit unconscious expression — to the driving agency at work during earlier stages of evolution.

***

"Here it is important to acknowledge the limits of our own powers of selfhood. Our creative thinking has not evolved to the point where it can consciously take hold at the root of material manifestation. Of course, we do move our own bodies. But we don’t know how we do so, or with the aid of what unconscious processes. At the same time, we know of no limit upon our evolutionary potential to continue expanding our sphere of intentional activity by raising unconscious processes to consciousness, where they become our own responsibility.

"As far as it goes, our distinctive human consciousness can be seen as the highest achievement of consciousness on earth to date. But it is also, in another sense, a form of interior life not yet equal to the unconscious wisdom possessing the simplest one-celled organism. We humans certainly have room for a further evolution of consciousness!

"What is certain is that we have been given the miracle of our own self-aware understanding, through which we can begin to understand other organisms — their inner life, their embodied way of being, and their evolution. And so we have the privilege of discovering ever more fully the connections, not only between our highest functioning and the intelligence of the cells in our bodies, but also between our own minds and the entire, far-from-mindless creative drama of life on this planet."

Comment: for Talbott there is an agency which caused evolution. We are the pinnacle of that process, and now we control it. Do not denigrate our exceptionality! It has its own important meaning in this reality.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life?utm_sourc...

we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living organisms. A grasp of just what it is that enables an entity to act as an autonomous agent, altering its behaviour and environment to achieve certain ends, should help reconcile biology to the troublesome notions of purpose and function.

***

This reveals a crucial dimension of agency: the ability to make choices in response to new and unforeseen circumstances.

***

Agency stems from two ingredients: first, an ability to produce different responses to identical (or equivalent) stimuli, and second, to select between them in a goal-directed way. Neither of these capacities is unique to humans, nor to brains in general.

***

Generating behavioural alternatives isn’t the same as agency, but it’s a necessary condition. It’s in the selection from this range of choices that true agency consists. This selection is goal-motivated: an organism does this and not that because it figures this would make it more likely to attain the desired outcome.

***

To get to the nub of agency, we need to leave biology behind. Instead, we can look at agency through the prism of the physics of information, and reflect on the role that information processing plays in bringing about change.

***

This link between organisation, information and agency is finally starting to appear, as scientists now explore the fertile intersection of information theory, thermodynamics and life. In 2012, Susanne Still, working with Gavin Crooks of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and others, showed why it’s vital for a goal-directed entity such as a cell, an animal or even a tiny demon to have a memory. With a memory, any agent can store a representation of the environment that it can then draw upon to make predictions about the future, enabling it to anticipate, prepare and make the best possible use of its energy – that is, to operate efficiently.

***

Crooks and their colleagues found that efficiency depends on an ability to focus only on information that’s useful for predicting what the environment is going to be like moments later, and filtering out the rest. In other words, it’s a matter of identifying and storing meaningful information: that which is useful to attaining your goal.

***

Here, is a possible story we can tell about how genuine biological agency arises, without recourse to mysticism. Evolution creates and reinforces goals – energy-efficiency, say – but doesn’t specify the way to attain them. Rather, an organism selected for efficiency will evolve a memory to store and represent aspects of its environment that are salient to that end. That’s what creates the raw material for agency.

***

organisms with memories that permit ‘contemplation’ of alternative actions, based on their internal representations of the environment, could make more effective choices. Brains aren’t essential for that (though they can help). There, in a nutshell, is agency.

***

The crucial point of all this is that agency – like consciousness, and indeed life itself – isn’t just something you can perceive by squinting at the fine details. Nor is it some second-order effect, with particles behaving ‘as if’ they’re agents, perhaps even conscious agents, when enough of them get together. Agents are genuine causes in their own right, and don’t deserve to be relegated to scare quotes. Those who object can do so only because we’ve so far failed to find adequate theories to explain how agency comes about. But maybe that’s just because we’ve failed to seek them in the right places – until now.

Comment: agency shows purposeful activity. This essay shows the use of memory and information, both actively sensed and stored. DNA is a required code to do this. The article presumes this complex arrangement simply evolved. I think it was obviously designed.

dhw: The pattern that emerges from this article could hardly be clearer: that the purpose behind all the cellular activity is survival (to which I would add the all-important factor of improving chances of survival – hence innovation), and there is no blind evolutionary algorithm but a continual process of intelligent organisms (cells) deliberately seeking their own ways of implementing their purpose. Nobody knows the origin of this intelligence, but Talbott, like Darwin, is focusing on Chapter Two of life.

DAVID: It is easy for me to see the necessity for a designing mind as the 'evolutionary algorithm'. Every Talbott insight leads me to God. I wonder where is leads Talbott?
And
DAVID: …all of this struggle to understand is easy if you realize a designing mind is behind all of it. Talbott is pure ID without being ID.

dhw: According to you, ID does not commit itself to your God as the designing mind. I would suggest that Talbott’s arguments should lead him to Shapiro’s theory, and the question of how life and cellular intelligence first came into existence can remain open.

DAVID: ID just doesn't mention God but He is always understood as the designer. It is fun to check Talbott as He completes his book and continues to wonder. I don't think Shapiro's theory would satisfy Talbott in regard to the origin of purposeful activity in life.

dhw: I don’t think Shapiro sets out to explain origins. As I understand it, his theory explains how evolution works – not through random mutations and not through your God personally programming or dabbling every innovation, strategy, lifestyle etc., but through the intelligence of cells. If, as you tell us, Shapiro is a practising Jew, then presumably he would believe that God is the inventor of the intelligent cell – but I suspect that he is wise enough to separate his scientific work from his personal beliefs.

Not from me. Known fact: Shapiro was president of his Temple. He never has discussed God's role as a practicing scientist. For Shapiro bacteria modify DNA with purpose, source of purposeful activity is a black box to Shapiro, which is what I implied above..

DAVID: It is easy for me to see the necessity for a designing mind as the 'evolutionary algorithm'. Every Talbott insight leads me to God. I wonder where is leads Talbott?
And
DAVID: …all of this struggle to understand is easy if you realize a designing mind is behind all of it. Talbott is pure ID without being ID.

dhw: According to you, ID does not commit itself to your God as the designing mind. I would suggest that Talbott’s arguments should lead him to Shapiro’s theory, and the question of how life and cellular intelligence first came into existence can remain open.

DAVID: ID just doesn't mention God but He is always understood as the designer. It is fun to check Talbott as He completes his book and continues to wonder. I don't think Shapiro's theory would satisfy Talbott in regard to the origin of purposeful activity in life.

I don’t think Shapiro sets out to explain origins. As I understand it, his theory explains how evolution works – not through random mutations and not through your God personally programming or dabbling every innovation, strategy, lifestyle etc., but through the intelligence of cells. If, as you tell us, Shapiro is a practising Jew, then presumably he would believe that God is the inventor of the intelligent cell – but I suspect that he is wise enough to separate his scientific work from his personal beliefs.

QUOTES: "And yet, anyone who considers the core logic of natural selection, as discussed in Chapter 17, can hardly help noticing that the logic relies centrally upon organisms being capable of carrying out all the activities necessary to their life and “struggle for survival”. It also requires organisms capable of reproducing and preparing an inheritance for their offspring. In other words, it requires living beings with precisely those features that presented us with the problem of purposive activity in the first place.

"But if natural selection, in order to operate, must take for granted all the familiar forms of living activity — and who does not see this? — then to say selection explains biological purposiveness looks very much like question-begging.”

dhw: This sums it all up. Firstly, natural selection does not explain purposefulness, and I really don’t know why this dead horse is still being flogged. Natural selection only explains why some life forms, strategies, lifestyles survive and others don’t. Nobody can explain how life forms, plus the ability to reproduce and to evolve, originated, or how speciation actually happens. But what is crystal clear is that these abilities are present and they are used for the purpose of survival or improving chances of survival. This is the moment when Talbott could ask what is the basic nature of these abilities, and you have quoted him in your Part Two:

TALBOTT: If, as many do today, we acknowledge a kind of cognition in cells sensing and responding to each other, how much more should we acknowledge the causal (not to mention the intentional) connections between all those organisms possessing specialized sense organs!

dhw: Yes indeed, those organisms consist of cell communities, and their specialized sense organs consist of cell communities, and the cells and their communities sense and respond to one another. It’s good to hear that many people today acknowledge a kind of cognition. Time to bring in Shapiro’s theory that cognitive cells are the producers of "evolutionary novelty".

TALBOTT: "Only when we ignore the living powers required for such transformations can we subconsciously transfer our ineradicable sense of these powers to the working of a blind evolutionary algorithm."

dhw: So let us not ignore them. The pattern that emerges from this article could hardly be clearer: that the purpose behind all the cellular activity is survival (to which I would add the all-important factor of improving chances of survival – hence innovation), and there is no blind evolutionary algorithm but a continual process of intelligent organisms (cells) deliberately seeking their own ways of implementing their purpose. Nobody knows the origin of this intelligence, but Talbott, like Darwin, is focusing on Chapter Two of life.

DAVID: It is easy for me to see the necessity for a designing mind as the 'evolutionary algorithm'. Every Talbott insight leads me to God. I wonder where is leads Talbott?
And
DAVID: …all of this struggle to understand is easy if you realize a designing mind is behind all of it. Talbott is pure ID without being ID.

dhw: According to you, ID does not commit itself to your God as the designing mind. I would suggest that Talbott’s arguments should lead him to Shapiro’s theory, and the question of how life and cellular intelligence first came into existence can remain open.

ID just doesn't mention God but He is always understood as the designer. It is fun to check Talbott as He completes his book and continues to wonder. I don't think Shapiro's theory would satisfy Talbott in regard to the origin of purposeful activity in life.

"But if natural selection, in order to operate, must take for granted all the familiar forms of living activity — and who does not see this? — then to say selection explains biological purposiveness looks very much like question-begging.”

This sums it all up. Firstly, natural selection does not explain purposefulness, and I really don’t know why this dead horse is still being flogged. Natural selection only explains why some life forms, strategies, lifestyles survive and others don’t. Nobody can explain how life forms, plus the ability to reproduce and to evolve, originated, or how speciation actually happens. But what is crystal clear is that these abilities are present and they are used for the purpose of survival or improving chances of survival. This is the moment when Talbott could ask what is the basic nature of these abilities, and you have quoted him in your Part Two:

TALBOTT: If, as many do today, we acknowledge a kind of cognition in cells sensing and responding to each other, how much more should we acknowledge the causal (not to mention the intentional) connections between all those organisms possessing specialized sense organs!

Yes indeed, those organisms consist of cell communities, and their specialized sense organs consist of cell communities, and the cells and their communities sense and respond to one another. It’s good to hear that many people today acknowledge a kind of cognition. Time to bring in Shapiro’s theory that cognitive cells are the producers of "evolutionary novelty".

TALBOTT: "Only when we ignore the living powers required for such transformations can we subconsciously transfer our ineradicable sense of these powers to the working of a blind evolutionary algorithm."

So let us not ignore them. The pattern that emerges from this article could hardly be clearer: that the purpose behind all the cellular activity is survival (to which I would add the all-important factor of improving chances of survival – hence innovation), and there is no blind evolutionary algorithm but a continual process of intelligent organisms (cells) deliberately seeking their own ways of implementing their purpose. Nobody knows the origin of this intelligence, but Talbott, like Darwin, is focusing on Chapter Two of life.

DAVID: It is easy for me to see the necessity for a designing mind as the 'evolutionary algorithm'. Every Talbott insight leads me to God. I wonder where is leads Talbott?
And
DAVID: …all of this struggle to understand is easy if you realize a designing mind is behind all of it. Talbott is pure ID without being ID.

According to you, ID does not commit itself to your God as the designing mind. I would suggest that Talbott’s arguments should lead him to Shapiro’s theory, and the question of how life and cellular intelligence first came into existence can remain open.

https://bwo.life/bk/evotelos.htm

s Teleology Disallowed in the Theory of Evolution?

An animal’s development from zygote to maturity is a classic picture of telos-realizing activity. Through its agency and purposiveness, an animal holds its disparate parts in an effective unity, making a single whole of them. This purposiveness informs the parts “downward” from the whole and “outward” from the inner intention, and is invisible to strictly physical analysis of the interaction of one part with another.

Biologists in general have failed to take seriously the reality of the animal’s agency, and have considered it unthinkable that something analogous to this agency could play through populations of organisms in evolution, just as it plays through populations of cells in an organism. I have tried to suggest that there are no grounds for making a radical distinction between the two cases.

"And then, addressing the idea that natural selection explains (or explains away) biological purposiveness, I focused on three closely related problems:

"• The preservation of purposive (functional) traits — or any traits at all — by natural selection neither explains their origin nor shows how they can be understood solely in terms of physical lawfulness.

"• Selection itself is defined in terms of, and thoroughly depends on, the purposive lives of organisms. This purposiveness must come to intense expression in order to provide the basic pre-conditions for natural selection. These conditions are the production of variation; the assembly and transmission of an inheritance; and the struggle for survival. Since the entire logic of natural selection is rooted in a play of purposiveness, it cannot explain that purposiveness.

"• Finally, the understanding of organisms in physical / mechanistic / machine-like terms offers no solid purchase for the evolutionary tinkering through which teleological traits are supposed to arise. An organism is first of all a characteristic activity, not a tinkerable machine, and its drive toward self-realization explains its developing structure at every level of observation much more than that structure explains its drive toward self-realization. In particular, genes have no way to guide the moment-by-moment, purposive activity of extended molecular processes such as RNA splicing and DNA damage repair.

"All this has been to clear away some of the major stumbling blocks biologists inevitably feel whenever evolution is said to have a purposive, or teleological, character."

Talbott adds this in his next not fully written chpter:

"We should be clear about the real sticking point for biologists. The fact that most of the cells in a tightly knit body are physically contiguous and therefore subject to certain physical causes does not in any relevant sense distinguish the working of biological intention in such a body from its working in evolutionary transformation. The organisms in an evolving population have no fewer causal connections than the cells in an individual. Eating and being eaten are surely causal! — a fact that, quite reasonably, figures centrally in conventional theory. And there is also the role of cognition. If, as many do today, we acknowledge a kind of cognition in cells sensing and responding to each other, how much more should we acknowledge the causal (not to mention the intentional) connections between all those organisms possessing specialized sense organs!

"But while physical and chemical causal relations are certainly prerequisites for coherent transformation, whether in development or evolution, causal events do not explain their own coordination in extended living narratives. This is the crux of the matter. The reluctance of biologists to face the evident reality of evolution as a coherent narrative does not lie in the very real differences between development and evolution, but rather in a refusal to deal seriously with the problem of active biological wisdom and intention in either case."

Comment; all of this struggle to understand is easy if you realize a designing mind is behind all of it. Talbott is pure ID without being ID.

https://bwo.life/bk/evo_s.htm

"All biologists find themselves saying that organisms, in their physiology and behavior, carry out functions. These functions broadly constitute the subject matter requiring biological explanation. References to them are one way of acknowledging the task- and future-oriented character of living activity, since to carry out a function is to coordinate means in the service of an end.

"This end-directed activity seems to imply what we might call “interior being” — some form of intention and purposiveness in particular — and therefore demands that taboo-conscious biologists find a means to explain it away. The standard expedient is to say something like this: “Functions express the adaptedness of organisms, and adaptedness in general results from natural selection”. Every well-adapted trait exists because it (or a precursor) was once evolutionarily selected for its machine-like effectiveness as a function. This supposedly has nothing to do with any actual agency or intention on the part of organisms.

"And yet, anyone who considers the core logic of natural selection, as discussed in Chapter 17, can hardly help noticing that the logic relies centrally upon organisms being capable of carrying out all the activities necessary to their life and “struggle for survival”. It also requires organisms capable of reproducing and preparing an inheritance for their offspring. In other words, it requires living beings with precisely those features that presented us with the problem of purposive activity in the first place.

"But if natural selection, in order to operate, must take for granted all the familiar forms of living activity — and who does not see this? — then to say selection explains biological purposiveness looks very much like question-begging.

"Putting it a little differently: purposiveness and agency are not particular functions, or traits, that arose at some point in organisms previously lacking the trait. They are, rather, features synonymous with life as far as we know it. They are necessarily assumed in any evolutionary process we can even conceive as such, and therefore cannot be explained as the result of an evolutionary process.

"The problem has not been entirely missed. In 1962 the philosopher Grace de Laguna wrote a paper in which she remarked that only when we regard the organism as already “end-directed” does it “make sense to speak of ‘selection’ at all."

Comment: It is obvious first life came with the ability to survive and procreate. What built that into the first forms of life? There is no natural selective answer. 'Origin' does not ever imply 'survival' since there was no survival need before origin. And at origin death was built in. Did the first organism foresee that? Talbott asks interesting questions. Talbott takes this approach:

"The bare logic of natural selection, after all, makes no reference to the specific potentials concretely realized in the distinctive evolutionary trajectories leading from the simplest cells to redwoods and wildebeest, crayfish and cormorants. On the other hand, do we not discover something very like those potentials playing out in the distinctive developmental trajectories leading from a single-celled zygote to osteoblast and endothelium, neuron and neutrophil? And also when we watch the goliath beetle larva (or human embryo) metamorphosing into the adult form?

"Only when we ignore the living powers required for such transformations can we subconsciously transfer our ineradicable sense of these powers to the working of a blind evolutionary algorithm."

It is easy for me to see the necessity for a designing mind as the 'evolutionary algorithm'. Every Talbott insight leads me to God. I wonder where is leads Talbott?

dhw: Yes, Gilbert Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” is the nub of the matter. I’m afraid I still find it impossible to believe that your God placed instructions in the first cells for every single innovation and every single solution to every problem for the rest of time. Even you find that hard to believe, since you also allow him to dabble. We should remember that millions of cell communities fail to respond adequately to stimuli and demands, which already raises question marks over the efficacy of your God’s “instructions”. How much simpler it would be if the ghost in all the different machines was a form of intelligence which responds in different ways to stimuli and demands – those ways varying from failure to adaptation to innovation. THAT would explain the whole of evolution, and it still leaves a place for God as the inventor of both the ghost and the machine.

DAVID: Same old issue. Obviously intelligent information/instructions is at work, and the source is? Chance is laughable.

dhw: How can information be intelligent? It takes intelligence to collect and to use information. I have not advocated chance as the source. Not knowing the source does not preclude the existence of something, which of course is your argument when you defend your belief in God. I leave the source open, but your God is a possibility. I’m afraid I find your theory of 3.8-billion-year-old instructions for every undabbled life form, econiche, natural wonder, strategy etc. in life’s history no less laughable than chance.

'Intelligent information' is a way of saying intelligently sourced information. you can laugh at God if you wish. Chance arrival of consciousness in humans is not reasonable, just an out for agnostics and atheists.

DAVID: Same old issue. Obviously intelligent information/instructions is at work, and the source is? Chance is laughable.

How can information be intelligent? It takes intelligence to collect and to use information. I have not advocated chance as the source. Not knowing the source does not preclude the existence of something, which of course is your argument when you defend your belief in God. I leave the source open, but your God is a possibility. I’m afraid I find your theory of 3.8-billion-year-old instructions for every undabbled life form, econiche, natural wonder, strategy etc. in life’s history no less laughable than chance.

QUOTE: Single cells don’t have minds of their own – so surely they don’t have goals, determination, gusto? When we attribute aims and purposes to these primitive organisms, aren’t we just succumbing to an illusion?

dhw: All the subsequent intellectual faffing around would be totally unnecessary if only Talbott would take the bull by the horns and acknowledge that single cells have their own form of intelligence (not to be compared to that of the human mind), and we do not know its source.

DAVID: How about God as the agency? This author just mimicked Talbott.

dhw: Why do you have to have your God sitting inside every single cell, providing it with its aims, determination and gusto, and making every decision in every situation it faces? How about your God designing both the cell and the mechanism that enables it to make its own decisions? I don’t understand your second comment.

DAVID: You've got it!!! God is not in every cell but His instructions as information in the genome provide all the cells need to respond to stimuli and demands automatically. My comment is obvious if you remember Talbott's writings. The author and Talbott are looking for the ghost in the machine that makes cells respond intelligently.

dhw: Ah, sorry. I had missed the fact that Talbott was not the author! Yes, Gilbert Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” is the nub of the matter. I’m afraid I still find it impossible to believe that your God placed instructions in the first cells for every single innovation and every single solution to every problem for the rest of time. Even you find that hard to believe, since you also allow him to dabble. We should remember that millions of cell communities fail to respond adequately to stimuli and demands, which already raises question marks over the efficacy of your God’s “instructions”. How much simpler it would be if the ghost in all the different machines was a form of intelligence which responds in different ways to stimuli and demands – those ways varying from failure to adaptation to innovation. THAT would explain the whole of evolution, and it still leaves a place for God as the inventor of both the ghost and the machine.

Same old issue. Obviously intelligent information/instructions is at work, and the source is?
Chance is laughable.

dhw: All the subsequent intellectual faffing around would be totally unnecessary if only Talbott would take the bull by the horns and acknowledge that single cells have their own form of intelligence (not to be compared to that of the human mind), and we do not know its source.

DAVID: How about God as the agency? This author just mimicked Talbott.

dhw: Why do you have to have your God sitting inside every single cell, providing it with its aims, determination and gusto, and making every decision in every situation it faces? How about your God designing both the cell and the mechanism that enables it to make its own decisions? I don’t understand your second comment.

DAVID: You've got it!!! God is not in every cell but His instructions as information in the genome provide all the cells need to respond to stimuli and demands automatically. My comment is obvious if you remember Talbott's writings. The author and Talbott are looking for the ghost in the machine that makes cells respond intelligently.

Ah, sorry. I had missed the fact that Talbott was not the author! Yes, Gilbert Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” is the nub of the matter. I’m afraid I still find it impossible to believe that your God placed instructions in the first cells for every single innovation and every single solution to every problem for the rest of time. Even you find that hard to believe, since you also allow him to dabble. We should remember that millions of cell communities fail to respond adequately to stimuli and demands, which already raises question marks over the efficacy of your God’s “instructions”. How much simpler it would be if the ghost in all the different machines was a form of intelligence which responds in different ways to stimuli and demands – those ways varying from failure to adaptation to innovation. THAT would explain the whole of evolution, and it still leaves a place for God as the inventor of both the ghost and the machine.

QUOTE: Single cells don’t have minds of their own – so surely they don’t have goals, determination, gusto? When we attribute aims and purposes to these primitive organisms, aren’t we just succumbing to an illusion?

dhw: All the subsequent intellectual faffing around would be totally unnecessary if only Talbott would take the bull by the horns and acknowledge that single cells have their own form of intelligence (not to be compared to that of the human mind), and we do not know its source.

DAVID: How about God as the agency? This author just mimicked Talbott.

dhw: Why do you have to have your God sitting inside every single cell, providing it with its aims, determination and gusto, and making every decision in every situation it faces? How about your God designing both the cell and the mechanism that enables it to make its own decisions? I don’t understand your second comment.

You've got it!!! God is not in every cell but His instructions as information in the genome provide all the cells need to respond to stimuli and demands automatically. My comment is obvious if you remember Talbott's writings. The author and Talbott are looking for the ghost in the machine that makes cells respond intelligently.

dhw: All the subsequent intellectual faffing around would be totally unnecessary if only Talbott would take the bull by the horns and acknowledge that single cells have their own form of intelligence (not to be compared to that of the human mind), and we do not know its source.

DAVID: How about God as the agency? This author just mimicked Talbott.

Why do you have to have your God sitting inside every single cell, providing it with its aims, determination and gusto, and making every decision in every situation it faces? How about your God designing both the cell and the mechanism that enables it to make its own decisions? I don’t understand your second comment.

QUOTE: Single cells don’t have minds of their own – so surely they don’t have goals, determination, gusto? When we attribute aims and purposes to these primitive organisms, aren’t we just succumbing to an illusion?

dhw: All the subsequent intellectual faffing around would be totally unnecessary if only Talbott would take the bull by the horns and acknowledge that single cells have their own form of intelligence (not to be compared to that of the human mind), and we do not know its source.

How about God as the agency? This author just mimicked Talbott

All the subsequent intellectual faffing around would be totally unnecessary if only Talbott would take the bull by the horns and acknowledge that single cells have their own form of intelligence (not to be compared to that of the human mind), and we do not know its source.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life?utm_sourc...

Animal immune systems depend on white blood cells called macrophages that devour and engulf invaders. ... under a microscope you can watch a blob-like macrophage chase a bacterium across the slide, switching course this way and that as its prey tries to escape through an obstacle course of red blood cells, before it finally catches the rogue microbe and gobbles it up.

But hang on: isn’t this an absurdly anthropomorphic way of describing a biological process? Single cells don’t have minds of their own – so surely they don’t have goals, determination, gusto? When we attribute aims and purposes to these primitive organisms, aren’t we just succumbing to an illusion?

***

One of biology’s most enduring dilemmas is how it dances around the issue at the core of such a description: agency, the ability of living entities to alter their environment (and themselves) with purpose to suit an agenda. Typically, discussions of goals and purposes in biology get respectably neutered with scare quotes: cells and bacteria aren’t really ‘trying’ to do anything, just as organisms don’t evolve ‘in order to’ achieve anything (such as running faster to improve their chances of survival). In the end, it’s all meant to boil down to genes and molecules, chemistry and physics – events unfolding with no aim or design, but that trick our narrative-obsessed minds into perceiving these things.

Yet, on the contrary, we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living organisms. A grasp of just what it is that enables an entity to act as an autonomous agent, altering its behaviour and environment to achieve certain ends, should help reconcile biology to the troublesome notions of purpose and function.

***

A bottom-up theory of agency could help us interpret what we see in life, from cells to societies – as well as in some of our ‘smart’ machines and technologies. We’re starting to wonder whether artificial intelligence systems might themselves develop agency. But how would we know, if we can’t say what agency entails? Only if we can ‘derive complex behaviours from simple first principles’, says the physicist Susanne Still of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, can we claim to understand what it takes to be an agent. So far, she admits that the problem remains unsolved.
***

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of action, but is a phantom evoked by our genetic and evolutionary history.

But this framing doesn’t explain agency; it simply tries to explain it away. Individual genes have no agency, so agency can’t arise in any obvious way from just gathering a sufficient number of them together. Pinning agency to the genome doesn’t tell us what agency is or what makes it manifest.

***

No one should suppose that macrophages are acting in the rich cognitive environment available to a wolf, but sometimes it’s hard to decide where the distinctions lie. Confusion can arise from the common assumption that complex agential behaviour requires a concomitantly complex mind.

***

To get to the nub of agency, we need to leave biology behind. Instead, we can look at agency through the prism of the physics of information, and reflect on the role that information processing plays in bringing about change.

***

This link between organisation, information and agency is finally starting to appear, as scientists now explore the fertile intersection of information theory, thermodynamics and life. In 2012, Susanne Still, working with Gavin Crooks of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and others, showed why it’s vital for a goal-directed entity such as a cell, an animal or even a tiny demon to have a memory. With a memory, any agent can store a representation of the environment that it can then draw upon to make predictions about the future, enabling it to anticipate, prepare and make the best possible use of its energy – that is, to operate efficiently.

***

The crucial point of all this is that agency – like consciousness, and indeed life itself – isn’t just something you can perceive by squinting at the fine details. Nor is it some second-order effect, with particles behaving ‘as if’ they’re agents, perhaps even conscious agents, when enough of them get together. Agents are genuine causes in their own right, and don’t deserve to be relegated to scare quotes. Those who object can do so only because we’ve so far failed to find adequate theories to explain how agency comes about. But maybe that’s just because we’ve failed to seek them in the right places – until now.

Comment: Same old problem: top down or bottom up.

dhw: Just like Darwin, Talbott is telling you that his theory does not exclude God! There is no wall – he remains open-minded. Walls are created by those who have fixed beliefs.

DAVID: All agreed. You and Talbott are twins. It still revolve about chance or design and both of you stay neutral on the choice. ID folks and I don't.

dhw: And so you continue to miss the point. It is not a question of chance v. design! It is a question of what drives evolution. From the theist’s point of view: did God directly create every life form, econiche, natural wonder etc. – as you claim – or did he create an autonomous mechanism to do its own designing? Chance doesn’t come into it. This is a theistic debate between creationism (direct design) and evolution (but not Darwin’s version, because intelligent design replaces random mutations) as your God’s method of achieving whatever may have been his purpose.

DAVID: I've missed nothing. You have neatly removed the issue of chance by putting evolutionary advancements totally into God's hands, whether He directly designs everything or puts in an auto-design in some or all of the new evolutionary advances. I'm happy that, at least, chance and Darwin's method of evolution are gone.

dhw: Just to be clear. I have not put evolutionary advancements totally into God’s hands. I have simply offered the theistic version of the theory. My “twin” and I (and Shapiro) are trying to understand how evolution works. They are scientists who have concluded from their observations and those of fellow scientists that cells are intelligent, and they have proposed that this intelligence is responsible for evolutionary advances. Darwin proposes random mutations; Turell proposes direct creation by his God. Talbott and Darwin (and I) leave open the question of how it all began, and leaving the subject open ALLOWS for God as the “first cause”.

Good summary of your position. Ider's and I propose there is a designer for all that happens, including the development of evolution, and the intelligent cells are the result of running under the control of intelligent information.

Under “immune complexity”:
QUOTE: However, immune functions are not restricted to these 'specialists,' and many more cell types are able to sense when they are infected and contribute to the immune response against pathogens.

dhw: Yet again I’m reminded of the ant colony. The cell communities of which all multicelluar organisms consist are constantly cooperating with one another to protect the body/colony as a whole.

Cells like individual ants follow onboard instructions to help the whole.

DAVID: All agreed. You and Talbott are twins. It still revolve about chance or design and both of you stay neutral on the choice. ID folks and I don't.

dhw: And so you continue to miss the point. It is not a question of chance v. design! It is a question of what drives evolution. From the theist’s point of view: did God directly create every life form, econiche, natural wonder etc. – as you claim – or did he create an autonomous mechanism to do its own designing? Chance doesn’t come into it. This is a theistic debate between creationism (direct design) and evolution (but not Darwin’s version, because intelligent design replaces random mutations) as your God’s method of achieving whatever may have been his purpose.

DAVID: I've missed nothing. You have neatly removed the issue of chance by putting evolutionary advancements totally into God's hands, whether He directly designs everything or puts in an auto-design in some or all of the new evolutionary advances. I'm happy that, at least, chance and Darwin's method of evolution are gone.

Just to be clear. I have not put evolutionary advancements totally into God’s hands. I have simply offered the theistic version of the theory. My “twin” and I (and Shapiro) are trying to understand how evolution works. They are scientists who have concluded from their observations and those of fellow scientists that cells are intelligent, and they have proposed that this intelligence is responsible for evolutionary advances. Darwin proposes random mutations; Turell proposes direct creation by his God. Talbott and Darwin (and I) leave open the question of how it all began, and leaving the subject open ALLOWS for God as the “first cause”.

Under “immune complexity”:
QUOTE: However, immune functions are not restricted to these 'specialists,' and many more cell types are able to sense when they are infected and contribute to the immune response against pathogens.

Yet again I’m reminded of the ant colony. The cell communities of which all multicelluar organisms consist are constantly cooperating with one another to protect the body/colony as a whole.

DAVID: Intelligent design always implies a designer exists for direct design.

dhw: But it does not imply that a designer directly designed every species and natural wonder. A designer could also have designed a mechanism whereby organisms autonomously did their own designing, and that is what Talbott is advocating and what you refuse even to consider.

DAVID: I've said Talbott is your mirror image. You've just illustrated it. IDer's propose direct design.

dhw: The fact that Talbott and I think alike and that IDers propose direct design is no reason to reject the (theistic) theory that your God designed a mechanism enabling organisms to do their own designing. That is also “intelligent design”!

DAVID: We IDer's see the metaphorical wall as yours.

dhw: Then you have completely misunderstood Talbott (and me). Look at this quote:

QUOTE: This in no way conflicts with any convictions you may hold regarding a transcendent creative power sustaining the universe. It is merely to say that what we observe on earth is a power of life immanent in the organisms around us. Presumably you believe not only in the transcendence, but also in the immanence of the creative power.(dhw’s bold)

dhw: Just like Darwin, Talbott is telling you that his theory does not exclude God! There is no wall – he remains open-minded. Walls are created by those who have fixed beliefs.

DAVID: All agreed. You and Talbott are twins. It still revolve about chance or design and both of you stay neutral on the choice. ID folks and I don't.

dhw: And so you continue to miss the point. It is not a question of chance v. design! It is a question of what drives evolution. From the theist’s point of view: did God directly create every life form, econiche, natural wonder etc. – as you claim – or did he create an autonomous mechanism to do its own designing? Chance doesn’t come into it. This is a theistic debate between creationism (direct design) and evolution (but not Darwin’s version, because intelligent design replaces random mutations) as your God’s method of achieving whatever may have been his purpose.

I've missed nothing. You have neatly removed the issue of chance by putting evolutionary advancements totally into God's hands, whether He directly designs everything or puts in an auto-design in some or all of the new evolutionary advances. I'm happy that, at least, chance and Darwin's method of evolution are gone.