autonomy v. automaticity (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, January 22, 2018, 13:29 (2286 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID (under “Plant awareness”): A new study of how plants are aware of the world and what might affect them:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180119190358.htm

DAVID’s comment: It is not surprising plants have these automatic molecular mechanisms to sense the outside world. They must be able to defend themselves to survive.

dhw: Plant “awareness” provides further evidence that even brainless organisms have the ability, to use your very own words, to “work out” their own ways (= autonomously) of solving problems, as opposed to being preprogrammed and as acknowledged on 19 January in your endorsement of the sentence you bolded with such enthusiasm.

DAVID: You fully know my view of the IM God-given characteristics. Plant awareness is use of automatic molecular mechanisms to pick up signals. The responses are also automatic, as in heliotropism. Your conflation that awareness proves an ability to 'work out' as if plants slowly evolve/suddenly invent/'think' of a response is simply more Darwin-speak. The authors you love to quote are all Darwin-infected scientists, with a slanted objectivity.

The authors I quote – McClintock, Margulis, Shapiro, Bühler – (have) all spent a lifetime studying cellular behaviour, and I have no idea why you should think their unequivocal conclusions are “infected” by Darwin. I don’t recall Darwin ever mentioning cellular intelligence, let alone proposing my own hypothesis that cellular intelligence was the mechanism that enabled evolution to advance. Perhaps you can give me a reference. The term “work out” was your own, used in relation to the behaviour of a parasite plant, and was emphatically confirmed by you, as below:

DAVID’s comment (under “parasite controls plants’ defense"): The evolution of this arrangement must have been stepwise with the Dodder partially independent until it worked out a way to silence the plant's defenses and then become totally obligate. Living organisms show purposeful behavior. I think that was programmed into life when life originated. God at work. (dhw’s bold)

dhw: Thank you for another fascinating natural wonder, and also for the long awaited acknowledgement that the Dodder must have worked out a way to silence the plant’s defences. Yes, indeed, living organisms show purposeful behaviour, and it may well be that when life originated, your God gave them the means to behave purposefully and to work out their own solutions to life's problems, as opposed to preprogramming their behaviour and all the solutions. Hallelujah! (David’s bold)

DAVID: Hallelujah ha! The bolded sentence fits my theory perfectly. "Gave them the means" simply implies that God preprogrammed them with an inventive mechanism, as we have discussed before.

What fitted your theory perfectly on a Friday was rejected on the Saturday.