autonomy v. automaticity (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, March 02, 2018, 14:46 (2247 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: The assumption that bacteria don’t know what they’re doing because imperious nature imperiously instructs them to maintain their equilibrium is imperious.
DAVID: The requirement for homeostasis is essential, not imperious for life to continue living.

dhw: You have missed the point. What is imperious is the assumption that they don’t know what they’re doing and are merely following instructions.

Homeostasis is following instructions. See new entry on feedback loops.

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DAVID: Changing the way you look to others is camouflage. Ants don't change their looks. Lots of insects are built to do it. Think of eye spots on butterflies. Why not a God-given program as one of the patterns of evolution that He uses in managing evolution

dhw: These are all strategies for survival, and you continue to educate us with more and more of these natural wonders, for which many thanks. But according to you, 3.8 billion years ago your God specially preprogrammed each and every one to be passed on by the first living cells so that they could keep life going until he could at last produce the only thing he really wanted to produce, which was the brain of Homo sapiens. You seem to have God saying to himself:” I need this beetle camouflage trick because otherwise life might die out before I can give the sap his brain.” I find this increasingly absurd. Why can’t your God have endowed all these creatures with the autonomous means of devising their own strategies?

God may have endowed them with an IM. You have always objected to my assertion that the IM has God's guidelines. And again,as usual, you brush off balance of nature, which must exist to support a lengthy evolutionary process, the only one history provides. I'll use your deist reasoning: if God exists He obviously used a long evolutionary process.