LUCA latest: Shapiro redux (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, July 24, 2023, 09:23 (278 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: All we see are epigenetic editing, nothing close to speciation. Nothing 'major' in current research.

dhw: It’s a theory! Nobody knows how speciation happens! But if we know that “minor” autonomous editing does occur, why should we discount the possibility that “major” autonomous editing could also have occurred when conditions required it?

DAVID: It is still happening in bacteria, but currently nowhere else. Since no new species are popping up, do you infer previously speciating brilliant cells have stopped?

Of course, just as in your theory your God has stopped speciating. We are going through a period of stasis, just as earlier species did. Who knows what will happen in the next thousand million years? I went on to ask what evidence there was for your illogical theories.

DAVID: Same old complaint. The designs of life require a designing mind.

Same old dodge. Shapiro’s theory offers you designing “minds” (intelligent cells) and I suggest that these may have been designed by your God.

DAVID: I faithfully presented Shapiro as an historical figure in the debate.

dhw: You faithfully quoted his exact summary of his theory, e.g. “evolutionary novelty arises from the production of new cell and multicellular structures as a result of cellular self-modification and cell fusions.” Stop pretending that I have “blown it up”.

DAVID: The issue is that Shapiro proposed the bacterial ability to edit their DNA might explain evolution! You morphed that into brilliant cell committees running evolution.

Please stop ignoring what Shapiro wrote. Read the above! It doesn’t say bacterial editing ability might explain evolution. It says cellular self-modification produces evolutionary novelty, and the rest of the summary you quote in your book lists all those qualities of cells which denote their intelligence.

DAVID: And further you see the tiny factories that are our cells as intelligent, when they are designed to run intelligently and constantly repeat their processes.

You always focus on those cellular processes which have become established and hence automatic, and you don’t seem to have grasped the elementary fact that all those processes, except for those present in the original first cells (possibly designed by your God) were once new, and new species can only be formed when instead of or in addition to repeating their processes, cells introduce new ones. (Shapiro calls them “evolutionary novelty”.) Hence evolution from single cells to trilobites, dinosaurs, the duck-billed platypus and humans.