A new synthesis: Four dimensions of Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 10, 2015, 12:16 (3053 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: In the simplest of terms: did life/intelligence originate by chance or by design? This question, however, is irrelevant to the actual process of evolution.

DAVID: No, no, no! If life was designed then per force, design rules evolution. You want design to start the process and then stop?-dhw: ...An alternative to your God's preprogramming/dabbling and my autonomous inventive intelligence is Darwin's random mutations, but he also stated explicitly that the origin of life was not relevant to his theory. Another alternative of course is Creationism, but our subject here is evolution. 
DAVID: Darwin is not an authority. I don't care what he explicitly stated. I view evolution as starting with the origin of life, for that first life had to contain the mechanism for evolution. You keep returning to Darwin, but it is quite clear to me his theory is worthless in describing an evolutionary mechanism. -Why have you isolated the reference to Darwin and ignored the rest of my post? Of course first life had to contain the mechanism for evolution, but I was responding to your claim that if that mechanism was designed, design ruled evolution. That is true of your hypothetical reading of God's mind - that he designed the mechanism so that it would automatically produce humans and food for humans. But according to my hypothesis - theistic version - God designed the mechanism and gave it autonomous intelligence to do its own designing (a different meaning for "design rules evolution"). And according to Darwin - theistic version - God designed the mechanism so that it would produce random combinations (design does not rule evolution, even if the mechanism was designed). We are not arguing about the likelihood of ANY of these. I am merely pointing out that yours is only one version of God's design, and it depends entirely on your fixed belief that humans were his purpose. -However, I was wrong to say that the origin is irrelevant to the process. I made the same mistake as you, and focused only on my own hypothesis concerning how evolution proceeds. Your hypothesis (preprogramming/dabbling) is clearly not possible if God did not design the mechanism, whereas mine (autonomous intelligence) and Darwin's (random mutations) would function, whether God designed the mechanism or not. (I think Darwin's is a lot more far-fetched than mine!)
 
dhw: In other words, as we agreed, it requires intelligence to make information meaningful.
DAVID: Yes, and both are onboard living organisms.-There is information both inside and outside the organism, and both types need onboard intelligence to give them meaning.