Teleology & evolution: Stephen Talbott's take (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 11, 2016, 19:27 (2882 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The mechanisms don't need intelligence to run them. They are not driving an automobile but sitting in a driverless automobile.
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> dhw; How can an autonomous inventive or complexification mechanism create new organs, lifestyles, ”natural wonders” without being intelligent? The word “autonomous” means able to determine one's own actions, take one's own decisions, and in this case do one's own inventing/complexifying.-Look carefully at my driverless car analogy. The complexity mechanism sitting somewhere in a layer of the genome looks at preceding patterns and has the ability to add layers of new complexity. The cell can turn on the mechanism in response to some external stimulus, more oxygen, predator threats, ice age, etc. The cell is the passenger with an on-off switch for an intelligently designed CM. The cell does not intelligence to do this, just recognize the opportunity environmental stimulus and trip the switch.
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> dhw; We are back to square one! On Thursday 9 June you agreed that an autonomous inventive mechanism was possible, and that your God would have provided it and may have dabbled “to correct problems” (i.e. after the innovation had been autonomously created). Now you are excluding that possibility and reverting to the hypothesis that all the innovations were preprogrammed, and the cellular communities have no autonomy but merely follow instructions!-See explanation above.