Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, April 29, 2013, 16:52 (4025 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What I know quite clearly is that there is intelligence in the cells in the form of an amazing code, its many layers, and the complex instructions within those layers to create automatic absolute control of the production processes of life and the responses to adversity when it appears.-dhw: In that case, I assume you are now prepared to accept the concept of the "intelligent cell"! It's the implications that are the issue between us.-DAVID: Not at all. You are avoiding the implications of my last post. I have stated that no one has any idea of how evolution really works. The evidence appears to demonstrate that once life appeared, and we certainly have no idea how that happened, there was a process of evolution. We have no idea how species appear, but they seem to erupt de novo, not in little bitty advances.-We have long since agreed that there was a process of evolution, and that punctuated equilibrium should replace gradualism (= "little bitty advances"). No disagreement here.-DAVID: Our difference is in each of us having a different concept of how a cell works at a molecular level. In my view automatically operating molecules under the control of the genome manufacture or perform whatever they are assigned to do. And later you say: "The cell has intelligence in that the cell is under control of the intelligence in the genome. It is a two step arrangement. The genome tells the cell what to do."-Again there is no disagreement. The genome provides the intelligence of the cell, and the molecules do as they are told. You do not say a human is not intelligent because his digestive system works automatically. If you agree that "there is intelligence in the cells", and it lies within the genome, you are agreeing that the cell is intelligent! (But we can revert yet again to the "intelligent genome" if it makes you happy.)-DAVID: What I am showing is that life is some type of emergent process, and that we only have currently only a glimpse at understanding the underlying mechanisms. The complexity to be elucidated seems overwhelming.-No disagreement here either.-DAVID: I must keep repeating that I am a theistic evolutionist. God created life, God does seem to dabble, but I don't know how much, so I make guesses based on the process I see in evoutionary development. I see the development of humans as a push that evolution, by itself, did not call for in the challenges presented for adaptation. Mine is not an atheistic styled argument. Design underlies all of evolution. You don't accept design, so you cannot follow the reasoning. If God dabbles, the structure of evolution is not rigid.-If I put on my theist hat, my objection is not to your idea that God dabbles, which I find perfectly reasonable, but to your proposal that God preplanned and preprogrammed the human line of the bush, whereas the other lines were byproducts that depended on unpredictable environmental changes. If you have dropped that highly inconsistent idea, then dabbling is fine with the theistic me. It's still perfectly compatible with your God endowing his invention with the intelligence to do its own inventing of new organs and organisms. As for humans not being called for in "the challenges presented for adaptation", I keep pointing out that if adaptation was the only necessity, evolution itself need never have happened. Life would have stuck at bacterial level. Innovation is the key, and the problem with your anthropocentric preplanning is that humans also depend on innovations resulting from random environmental change. Yes to dabbling, no to preprogramming!-DAVID: The intelligence in the genome runs the cell. I don't know how species or their separate organs formed, but the whole organism adapts. We see it but we don't know how. We don't know how organs adapt, and that is the cellular level you are struggling with. Individual cells do not create new organisms or even new organs. You are trying to put intelligence where it does not exist.-Of course individual cells don't create new organs or organisms. The latter are communities of cells, which is why I keep harping on about cooperation. Hence my image of Tom, Dick and Harry inventing the motor car. We don't know how it all works, but if the intelligence in the genome runs the cell, and cells combine to create new organs and organisms, how can you say I am putting intelligence where it does not exist?