Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 13, 2021, 15:45 (1110 days ago) @ dhw

Survival

DAVID: Just opposite: species survive because of God's designs. Survival struggles do not drive evolution.

dhw: It is not the opposite! It is purpose and result: according to your theory, your God wanted organisms to survive, and so he designed ways in which they could survive, and so they survived because of his designs. The purpose of the evolutionary innovations was to enable organisms to survive – totally in keeping with Darwin’s theory.

Absolutely no!!! "Evolutionary innovations" advanced evolution from bacteria. God's new designs drive evolution forward.

Cambrian

DAVID: Cellular intelligence is represented by the instructions God gave to cells so they will function in a way that creates life.

dhw: I’m not sure what “represented by the instructions” means. Intelligence is intelligence. It manifests itself by performing actions that indicate sentience and cognition. And so the theistic version of my theory would be that your God designed cells’ ability to live, to reproduce, and autonomously to vary their own structures when adapting to or exploiting new conditions.

Cells seem intelligent by following the instructions God gave them.

Xenobots
QUOTES: "Normally, hairlike structures called cilia on frog skin repel pathogens and spread mucus around. But on the xenobots, cilia allowed them to motor around. That surprising development “is a great example of life reusing what’s at hand,” says study coauthor Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

Xenobots have no nerve cells and no brains. Yet xenobots — each about half a millimeter wide — can swim through very thin tubes and traverse curvy mazes. When put into an arena littered with small particles of iron oxide, the xenobots can sweep the debris into piles. Xenobots can even heal themselves; after being cut, the bots zipper themselves back into their spherical shapes.

DAVID: This is not puzzling to me. The clumps of skin cells are simply following the instructions they have in their DNA.

dhw: I’m surprised their DNA tells them to accomplish tasks in a way that surprises the researchers. It all sounds to me very much like the form of intelligence exhibited by bacteria and viruses, which also have no brains and yet all too frequently manage to outsmart us by intelligently “re-using what’s at hand”.

The bacteria and viruses follow instructions they were given by God.