causation (Introduction)

by romansh , Saturday, June 07, 2014, 18:07 (3609 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Saturday, June 07, 2014, 18:24

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.-Programmed and pre-programmed ... what is the difference?-Also we have to be careful when using anthropomorphizations like instructed. While I think they are useful in communication, they can be very misleading.-In David's (abbreviated list) of things that are self guided, definitely include the environment ... and I certainly would not use the phrase self guided to describe epigenetics. -The only exception I might consider is say a radioactive atom (say potassium) decays within a cell and changes the epigenetic structure. Even then this could be viewed as the potassium coming from the environment.