Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by David Turell , Monday, May 29, 2017, 15:33 (2521 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You at claiming that bacteria invented these pathways we see along the way. Did they invent them then with an already intelligent ability? Not without God's help.

dhw: I have made no such claim. I wrote that the potential solutions to all the different problems must already be there, but as opposed to your God preprogramming every single one of them into the first living cells and leaving it to sheer luck for some bacteria to switch on the right programme, some of them may have worked out the right solution for themselves, using what I have always said is their possibly God-given intelligence.

Makes no sense. 'Potential solutions' are the existing alternative pathways, which bacteria that have them can switch on, as current studies show.

dhw: I don’t know why you think complexity without any purpose is “more important” than complexity for the sake of improvement. Using your favourite example of the whale, more important for what? My suggestion is below:

DAVID: Your just-so story ignores the required huge changes. Not worth the trouble.

dhw: Why is survival or a better life a just-so story? How would you describe a story that runs: God made huge changes over several million years to enable whales to live in the water, but he had no conceivable reason for doing so except complexity for the sake of complexity?

Makes the best sense. I don't think you recognize the enormity of the changes required to put a mammal into a totally aquatic lifestyle.

DAVID: On the other hand I see the current end of evolution resulting in the most complex invention of all from evolution, the human brain. Viewed this way, as evolution driven by a complexification drive, makes the whole of evolution understandably logical. The whales are simply a complexification branch of the bush gone wild. Improvement not always needed.

dhw: This is a very promising line of thought. There is, of course, no logic to the argument that your God’s aim was to produce the human brain and so evolution went wild and resulted in billions of purposeless complexifications. But you have reiterated over and over again that your God is in charge, in which case how could evolution run wild unless he WANTED it to run wild? Hence the higgledy-piggledy bush as organisms did their own thing, as opposed to his specially designing every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder. We are making remarkable progress.

You have at long last embarked on a line of thinking that revolutionizes your previous hypotheses and puts them directly in line with my own as an “understandably logical” explanation of the higgledy-piggledy bush, and yet you have made no comment.

I used 'run wild' as an expression of exuberance. I have not separated a drive to complexity as separate from God's control. It appears to me as a method He uses. And it sure helps explain the whales.

dhw: I have always used the twin concepts of survival and improvement as driving forces, and neither of them depends on competition, though of course it may be one factor. Cooperation is an equally powerful one.
DAVID: Your just-so stories smell of Darwin, I'm sorry to say. I'm attacking your improvement theory. I've always thought complexity was more important. It's in my first book.

dhw: I don’t know why you keep referring to Darwin, or why you consider the drive for survival and/or improvement/complexity, competition and/or cooperation a smelly “just-so” story. See above for complexity versus improvement.

You use 'survival' and 'competition' which are Darwin terms. I have never considered the idea of the struggle to survive as the driving force in evolution. Back to bacteria who arrived early and have had no problem surviving. Something else drives evolution. God. Darwin and you think God not needed.