More Denton: A new book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, February 05, 2016, 21:33 (3003 days ago) @ dhw


> David's comment: Who made the 'natural telic law'? And note, an agnostic at Discovery Institute.
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> dhw: ... However, talk of a “natural telic law” may gloss over the fact that if common descent is true, innovations can only take place within individual organisms. This means that whatever mechanism caused innovations HAS to be within the organisms themselves. If you believe in God AND evolution, either he interferes with individual organisms, or he has preprogrammed them, or he has given them a mechanism with which to organize their own innovations (and lifestyles and wonders).-Those certainly are the three possibilities. I strongly question how an inventive mechanism arose de novo from the original single cells that started life, which is your primary theory.-> dhw: If you do not believe in God, either you have to opt for random mutations, or again the mechanism within the organisms does its own organizing. Self-organizing organisms thus fit in with both theistic and atheistic evolution, and also happen to fit in with the findings of many researchers in the field, .... This theory requires substituting “opportunities offered by” for “the demands of”. The “telic law” is organisms' drive for survival and/or improvement.-I've just gotten Denton's new book, but from the review he is discussing the possibility of a 'telic law' as does Nagel. 'Possible'. maybe yes, maybe no.
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> You have also offered us the following comments on the subject of evolution:
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> Re Spetner:
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> http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/02/information_and102571.html
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> QUOTE: ".... the evolutionary process has to increase the information from that in the cell until an elephant's worth of information has been achieved. There is no theory that can account for such a thing."
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> dhw: Yes there is. The theory that over thousands of millions of years, intelligent cells/cell communities have combined, shared information extrapolated from their environment, and cooperated in forming new combinations to exploit that environment.-Spetner's own theory is called 'nonrandom evolutionary hypothesis', by which he means, as you do hat individuals evolve under stress as epigenetic changes. He does not answer how this developed. Since he is an orthodox Jew, I can make a logical guess.
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> Genome complexity
> David's comment: As a physician I went from simply accepting evolution created this to realizing that evolution cannot create this as an unguided chance process!
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> dhw: If our evolutionary starting point is the intelligent cell, there is no chance involved in the process, since every innovation is the product of deliberate exploitation of the environment, though changes to the environment may themselves be the products of chance. The origin of the intelligent cell is open to conjecture.-And who or what gave the cell intelligence? No proof, but I would still say God.
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> Information: a computer scientist's take:
> David's comment: Matt might consider this. How does biologic evolution learn and add information? Epigenetics?
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> dhw: According to my hypothesis, evolution does not learn or add anything. Individual cells/cell communities (organisms) learn and add and combine information before taking communal decisions, and that is how they innovate and diversify, thereby causing evolution.-Again you are like Spetner.