Immunity: gene controls through special proteins (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 16, 2018, 18:42 (2017 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: This article is an exact exposition of Shapiro's work showing how cells can manipulate DNA for necessary purposes. Cells do operate intelligently because they follow intelligent instructions.

dhw: Thank you for another illuminating article. What a pity you have ended it by ignoring Shapiro’s explicit statements concerning the intelligence of cells. He does not say they follow intelligent instructions, and he says that people who reject the concept do so because of “large organisms chauvinism”. Of course he can’t prove it, but this is his belief based on a lifetime of research. Here are some more quotes for you, and I hope they will suffice to stop you from insinuating that Shapiro’s work supports your beliefs. (NB: As in the Egnor discussion, my aim here is to straighten out any misconceptions arising out of these posts. In my view Egnor misrepresents materialism, and here you misleadingly link Shapiro's work with your beliefs while omitting his own beliefs.)

"The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable. Our current ideas about evolution have to incorporate this basic fact of life."
(Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, p.2)

Are Cells Intelligent? - evo2.org
https://evo2.org/cells-intelligent

In a discussion with a Matthew Taylor he quotes:
From Barbara McClintock’s 1984 Nobel Prize paper
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1983/mcclintock-lecture.pdf

“Life requires cognition at all scopes and scales. The critical factor in evolution was the moment of instantiation of the self-referential cell. How that occurred is unknown, but the fact that cells are self-aware problem-solving agencies cannot be reasonably disputed."

SHAPIRO: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…. well, I vote for cells being intelligent. At least in some sense. [dhw: an important rider for sceptics like yourself - nobody would claim that cellular intelligence is the same as our own.]

SHAPIRO: The last question I would ask myself is: “Which hypothesis is more likely to lead us to interesting discoveries, new hypotheses and interesting observations? A) the idea that cells are dumb machines created by a series of accidental mutations and selected for survival, or B) the idea that cells are intelligent agents that direct their own development? [dhw: It could hardly be clearer which hypothesis he supports. He does not, however, mention the hypothesis that your God preprogrammed or personally dabbled every innovation in life’s history, but he could hardly support it if he believes that cells direct their own development.]

Natural genetic engineering - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_genetic_engineering

Within the context of the article in particular and Shapiro's work on Natural Genetic Engineering in general, the "guiding intelligence" is to be found within the cell. (For example, in a Huffington Post essay entitled Cell Cognition and Cell Decision-Making Shapiro defines cognitive actions as those that are "knowledge-based and involve decisions appropriate to acquired information," arguing that cells meet this criteria.)

I'm fully aware of Shapiro's stated views. He has stated bacteria can manipulate their DNA epigenetically and we know that is true. Lenski's 60,000 plus generations of E. coli finds they are still E. coli but have made minor adaptations to provided stresses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

What cannot be avoided is logic about cells. Either they are intelligently designed to have intelligent responses to stress and stimuli or somehow or other they have their own form of intelligence and use it. Either Shapiro or I am correct, as only those two presumptions are operational. My choice is obvious. "Guiding intelligence" can certainly be implanted intelligent instructions for proper automatic responses to the few stimuli bacteria receive.