Innovation; Just for dhw (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, December 17, 2015, 19:17 (3063 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This is the wildest story of innovations I've ever seen. Jelly fish evolved into internal parasites and don't look at all like their ancestors:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/when-jellyfish-became-parasites-stran...-David's comment: It is a long article, and it makes the point that the process of living evolution is very inventive. I don't know why.-Once again, you are confronted with the mystery of why your God should have preprogrammed or personally organized such a transformation when all he wanted to do was produce humans. But there is a comment near the end of the article that might offer two clues:
“All this is not to say that our own way is better and myxozons's worse because they are “degenerate”. Rather, the differences - and the genetic changes that go along with them - reflect what is best for each way of life and are fascinating to see.”-This suggests that organisms do what is best for them, not only in terms of survival but also in terms of improvement. You cannot tell us why God would have preprogrammed the jellyfish to change into parasites, or given them private tuition; the alternatives, as we have said so often, are sheer luck (random mutations), which neither of us can swallow, or that organisms are possessed of an autonomous inventive intelligence which enables them to seek “what is best for them” and to alter their structure accordingly. And yes, all these wonders are fascinating to see. So if there is a God who designed life and the mechanism for evolution, maybe he also finds all these unpredictable and unprogrammed results fascinating to see. Life as an ongoing spectacle...What a relief from eternal nothingness!
 
And blessings upon you, dear David, for there is more to come. Under “Lenski's E.coli:
DAVID: The very long term E. coli experiment does not change the culture medium environment but the bacteria themselves improve 'fitness'.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/44787/title/Constant-Evolution/-QUOTE: “The LTEE is “quite an abstract concept because, in the real world, environments are changing all the time,” said evolutionary biologist Louise Johnson of the University of Reading, U.K. However, results like these “mean it's worth keeping going,” she said. “If it had been the case that [adaptation] was grinding to a halt, then you could say, ‘OK, in 15 years time it's not going to be worth doing anymore.' But this [paper] seems to suggest that however long you keep going, you're going to have new surprises and new ways of exploiting the exact same environment.”-And so it is not only changes in the environment that trigger the drive for improvement. Organisms may even improve within the same environment. The bacteria are still bacteria, so we can't talk of innovation here, but the key words for me are “improve” and “exploit”. It's the same process as with the jellyfish and all other innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders: the drive for improvement and the exploitation of conditions. And it starts at the level of single cells. -Once again, my thanks not only for these articles but also for the intellectual integrity with which you have posted them, since you knew I would use them to support my own hypothesis.