Cell response to electric field (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 13:04 (4037 days ago) @ David Turell

Unanswered questions: You keep asking where in the cell my "intelligent energy" is located. Your First Cause is energy called Universal Intelligence and is "within and without" the universe. Since all organisms are composed of cells, none of your "universal intelligent energy" can therefore be located in the materials it's supposed to have created. Where is it located? You believe in a "soul" which returns after death to the "universal intelligent energy". Where in the body is it located?-*************-dhw: So God preprogrammed the first living organisms in such a way that through zillions of generations they would pass on the ability to invent DNA automatically, when millions of years later by sheer good fortune environmental conditions triggered his heritable DNA-inventing programme. [...] In fact, every single innovation was preprogrammed right from the start (um...except for non-preprogrammed byproducts like the flycatcher), to be triggered by a lucky break in the weather. And that, boys and girls, is how God turned bacteria into humans.
 
DAVID: I have preserved this paragraph of yours because with a few misconceptions it is right on! The bolded area must be corrected. Evolution is not fully pre-programmed.-My "um" parenthesis about the flycatching byproduct already pinpointed the massive contradiction. How does an automaton create something so complex as a fly-catching mechanism without being programmed and without having an inventive intelligence of its own? If one organism can create something new and functional without being preprogrammed, then so can they all. And how do you personally know which organisms have been preprogrammed and which haven't? (See your next but one puzzling comment.)-DAVID: The preprogramming in the first sentence, italicised, is correct. DNA has been given the ability to invent. We now call that aspect epigenetics, but it not yet fully understood or appreciated.
 
According to you, pre-DNA organisms were preprogrammed to invent DNA, which in turn was preprogrammed to invent some innovations but not others. Hardly surprising that it's not yet fully understood! At least you agree that your God's preprogramming relied on the luck of climate change. One up for chance, one down for God's clever planning.-DAVID: But as you so clearly point out, inventions like the flycatcher are quite striking in their inventiveness, but they are not a real contribution to the mainline of evolution, just part of the bush. The main thrust of evolution is to evolve humans. The program was highly successful. We are here.-So any invention that was not related to the human "mainline" was a byproduct which invented itself because it wasn't preprogrammed, but didn't invent itself because it had no "intelligence" of its own. Dinosaurs, then, were by-products which non-invented themselves automatically, and bonobos were preprogrammed. All somewhat confusing.
 
You rightly point out that neither bacteria nor primates had any need to evolve, and this is clear evidence of "intelligence" at work. But even your fellow believers can come up with less contradictory hypotheses than yours: 1) God created every species separately; 2) God kept intervening; 3) God invented a mechanism to do its own inventing, independently of himself. If we drop the anthropocentric hypothesis, they all fit in with the higgledy-piggledy bush, as do materialistic chance and my panpsychist evolution of "intelligences" within matter, making their own experiments as they gathered more and more information.-DAVID: Conclusion: DNA was present in the very first fully developed living prokaryotes, single-celled and still here, the largest bio-mass on Earth. Inventive DNA was programmed to respond very cleverly to challenges creating evolutionary advances, in large jumps, not Darwin's gradualism. We still don't understand the jumps...-Your explanation is that some jumps were preplanned billions of years in advance, and others just sort of happened, and they all depended on chance environmental changes. My alternative explanation is that the evolving, internal "intelligence" of genomes used the changing conditions as they arose. Your theory still doesn't explain unpreprogrammed and yet automated "byproducts" like flycatchers and brontosauruses, whereas mine does.
 
DAVID: ...but that is why science is fun. We still have much to learn, and I predict our learning will confirm my theory about the control of evolution as arranged by God.-Your theory is that evolution was only partly controlled by your God, so please tell us how to differentiate between what was and wasn't controlled, and how the uncontrolled by-products were able to invent complex mechanisms without being pre-programmed. It's as if their DNA had a mind of its own. One might even say it was "intelligent"! -DAVID: I am a good predictor. In my last book I predicted the newly discovered complexity of the genome, and said it will prove God beyond a reasonable doubt. Science is doing that now and will continue into the future.
 
You are a good advocate for the David Turell Guide to Self-Confidence. And with all these huge gaps and contradictions in your hypothesis, I have to agree 100% with the incontrovertible truth contained in your statement prior to the above: "We still have much to learn".