An inventive mechanism (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, September 27, 2014, 16:50 (3493 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Saturday, September 27, 2014, 17:02

dhw: The genome is part of the cell.
DAVID: It is the brains of the cell.-Exactly. It's taken best part of two years for you to accept that cells have the equivalent of a brain.
 
dhw: Generally the Turell organs work automatically and feed back to the intelligent, inventive mechanism inside the Turell head. Does that make you an automatic factory? The intelligent cell hypothesis does not specify the location of the mechanism, but if you say it's in the genome, that's fine with me.-DAVID: I don't know about your body, but all of my body and most other folks have an automatically functioning body with the brain that is mostly on its own and highly controlled by ones' self. I can become aware of that autonomous function by voluntarily thinking about it. A single cell in no different. Its production is monitored by feedback mechanisms provided by its genome.-I presume the typing error (“in no different”) = is no different. Of course we are not talking here about human levels of self-awareness. The point of the analogy is that cells are not automatons because they have an autonomous “brain” that takes its own decisions and is not preprogrammed.
 
dhw: Cooperation between cells (all hail, Lynn Margulis!) lies at the heart of the hypothesis concerning evolutionary innovations. These can only come about through intelligent communication, cell to cell or genome to genome if you like. Every single one preprogrammed 3.7 billion years ago, or personally manipulated by your God? If not, and since we dismiss random mutations, there has to be an autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism guiding the cells. No more fuzz, please!
-DAVID: The fuzz is yours. If cells were not programmed to coooperate there would be no life. Cells cooperate because they are instructed toc do so by their genomes. Starting with one DNA in the zygote, the DNA is modified for varying functions so that kidney cells are not liver cells. The 'autonomous intelligent mechanism guiding the cells' is the genome invented by an autonomous intelligent agent, God!-No fuzz, apart possibly from your reference to programmes and instructions, though at long last you are attributing these to the inventive "brain" of the cell (the genome) instead of to your God's 3.7-billion-year-old computer programme. You have now agreed that the cell is not an automaton - its body automatically obeys its brain (although some feedback will go the other way, since the brain also needs the material provided by the rest of the body). As regards its source, I have said all along that the inventive mechanism may have been designed by your God. That is a different hypothesis, as mine is only meant to explain the course of evolution. So which do you now think is most likely: 1) God's 3.7-billion-year old computer programme? 2) God personally creating every innovation and “wonder”? 3) God creating an autonomous, intelligent mechanism that does its own inventing?-DAVID: I just puzzle over how He did the speciation issue. The key is in the genome that the animal or plant receives at conception. Variation is inherited from various epigentic alerations made by preceding generations, which does not get us to a mechanism for speciation. And we have agreed Darwin doesn't work.-Agreed on all counts. Margulis called for further research on the nature of the cell, because she realized that every cell is a sentient, intelligent, cooperative, communicative being, and evolution depends on cooperation. My hypothesis that innovation (and hence speciation) is the product of cooperation between intelligent and inventive mechanisms within the cells, which initially you dismissed as a load of nonsense, is simply an extension of her ideas, and since it was you who introduced me to her, Shapiro and others in the first place, you shall have half the Nobel Prize money after all.