Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 14, 2013, 19:43 (4010 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I offered you a divine scenario: "God has implanted in the genome the ability to invent new organs to cope with or exploit changes in the environment. The genome gives out instructions to all the different cells, which cooperate, as instructed, to build the liver." (Plus, of course, everything it is connected to). In my view, this obviates the need for tweaking, even during the Cambrian. It also obviates the need for millions of innovations to have been preprogrammed in the very first life forms and handed down through billions of years and zillions of generations of different organisms (a scenario which does indeed make me incredulous). What are your objections?-DAVID: I have no objections, but your divine scenario assumes God is so perfect He can forsee all the complications when there are two evolutionary systems, life's and the Earth's running at the same time. I don't assume as much about God as religions or you do in your imaginations. I think you are more affected by the stories about God, created by religious pretentions of knowledge, than I am. Surprising for an agnostic, and I am the believer! -You have misunderstood the purpose of the above hypothesis. I'm trying to demonstrate to you that the difference between us does not lie in our view of the process of evolution itself, but in our views on the possible source of the innovative mechanism, and in your anthropocentric teleology. No matter what may be the origin of the intelligent cell/genome/DNA, you have no objections when I suggest that evolution works through the instructions given by this inner intelligence to the cells, which cooperate to form new organs and their connections. I make no assumptions about your God ... I'm focusing only on how evolution works, and in the above scenario, you agree that no matter what random changes there are in the environment, the intelligent genome will adapt in order to survive, or innovate in order to exploit the new conditions. You accept this so long as it fits in with your divine teleology, which is the massive assumption that underlies your own religious interpretation of evolution. Without your teleology, there would be no need for any interference by your God. Evolution would take its course, but you insist that this course has been directed towards the end product of humans, and that is why intervention may have been necessary. However, I have no problem with your argument that the mechanism itself is too complex to have come about by chance or by the gradual evolution of intelligence from within matter. Both hypotheses demand as much faith as your own.-dhw: However, if he does tweak, I would still like to know how YOU think he does it: telekinesis, operations in his skylab, magic? You are constantly dismissing my panpsychist hypothesis as nebulous, which I freely admit, and pressing me for details which I cannot provide. I demand equal rights for agnostics!-DAVID: I don't know and don't care, and that knowledge of his methology is not important to me, it is so clear that He is Production Manager. Remember his admonition about asking direct questions. "I am who I am". God purposely concealed Himself in or behind Quantum reality, and He is going to stay that way. We are back to the leap of faith, and admittedly not an easy leap. -If I believed in chance, or in my panpsychist hypothesis, and if you then asked me how it could possibly work, I could say to you I don't know or care how chance managed to put everything together, but it did. Or I don't know how non-conscious energy acquired consciousness, or how the intelligent genome acquired its intelligence, but it did. "We are back to the leap of faith." However, once we take any of these leaps, my account of how innovations work makes sense whatever the source, and you have no objections to it. Isn't this a breakthrough?