New Oxygen research; pre-Ediacaran (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, July 22, 2016, 10:10 (2837 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Every single activity, adaptation and innovation requires cooperation between the cell communities, and this means some kind of awareness of and adjustment to what other cells are doing. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that when neurons navigate, propel themselves, successfully migrate, and especially regulate their interactions, they know what they are doing. -DAVID: If cells know what they are doing in migrating to specific areas with specific connections, you are saying they have knowledge of what the overall plan looks like and know their prescribed role in advance. Please note the article today about roughly 200 specific areas in our brain. How can your description of cell activity result in specificity of brain areas? It won't.-But the “cell activity” DOES result in specificity, whether your God has preprogrammed the cells, personally directed them, or endowed them with the ability to direct themselves! Just as an ant colony consists of individuals fulfilling their particular roles within the community, thereby building a city with all its infrastructures, the cells in a community DO follow a plan - though in this case a plan of far, far, far greater complexity. Within the ant community is a guiding intelligence that assigns the roles, and I see this as a perfect analogy for what happens within single bodies, which are also a single community consisting of many communities. Presumably you believe that your God provided the ant community with its plans to build the city, whereas my proposal is that he gave them the intelligence to do it themselves. The same applies to the cell communities of our brains and bodies. The difference is the degree of complexity, not the basic principle of individual beings cooperating to create a city/a body/a brain.