Innovation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, April 29, 2013, 18:00 (4025 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: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. .....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! -In a sense you are correct. Dabbling is poking into the system for mid-flight corrections. Pre-programming is setting a course in advance. I've said I don't know, and literally can't know, but I don't see why a combination of both cannot be present. Bacteria are the most successful organisms, both in bio-mass and longevity. Why did they bother to form multicellular organisms? Either a one-time dabble or preprogramming fits. The same for humans springing out of the primate herd.
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> dhw: 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. 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?-As long as you put the 'intelligence' in the genome for each cell I am fine. And as long as you recognize the organism as a whole run by its whole DNA I'm fine. Now I have got to get you to admit that the genome is an amazing coding system, developed by an intelligence that can think and plan.