causation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 07, 2014, 15:43 (3611 days ago) @ dhw


> DAVID: I don't know how you have gotten rid of pre-programming. How did cell communities develop the 'adaptive and inventive' mechanisms; by chance mutations? Where did the information required come from?
> 
> dhw:Your questions have nothing to do with pre-programming, which would mean that the cell communities had no freedom of their own but simply did as they had been instructed to do - the exact opposite of an organism that "guides its own destiny". How did the mechanisms come into being? Maybe your God created them. All of the comments referred to the course of evolution, not to the origin of the mechanisms that enable evolution to take place.-But in my mind the mechanisms that allow organisms to self-direct and the processes that use mutation and natural selection are all part of evolution, working with informaton encoded in DNA and all the oher layers of genomic activity. You are splitting things up. It is demonstrated that all of this is at work at the same time. Did each part ofhe evolutionary process start at the same time or did each part develop separately? I am on the side of 'same time'.