Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 20, 2021, 12:11 (1103 days ago) @ David Turell

Cambrian
dhw: I’m afraid terms like “humanized” and “second-hand” do not offer one iota of logic to contradict my theory or to explain why you think your God could not have invented such a mechanism.

DAVID: To have an inventive mechanism, it must have the ability to abstractly plan for the future actions of the new form. As before, as a designer myself, I can tell you it is much easier to do it yourself. I did not tell the architects a verbal design, I did the design. Much faster and I ended up with exactly what was desired.

Yet again: adaptation occurs IN RESPONSE to new conditions, and my proposal is that innovations arise for the same reason: e.g. whale legs would have turned into flippers as a result of entering the water, not in anticipation of their doing so. And much as I admire your ability to design a house specially for your future needs, I doubt if you would be quite so eager if you were asked to specially design millions and millions of houses for the different needs of different people, especially if you were told that every single house was necessary if you were going to build the one house you wanted. The analogy is a silly one anyway. I asked you why you thought your God could not have designed a mechanism giving organisms the autonomous ability to do their own designing. After all, isn’t that precisely what you think he gave you?

DAVID (under “dimmer switch”): We see genes exert controls. We don't know how they do it. The results are logical and appear designed. How did the cells get so intelligent by themselves. Not naturally. God had to design them that way, by giving them the proper required information.

dhw: I like your question, and thank you for at last acknowledging that cells are intelligent (though no doubt you will withdraw that in your next post).

DAVID: God just gave them intelligent instructional information which they decoded/followed and therefore looked as if they were intelligent.

dhw: I don’t know why you have to drag “information” into the discussion. […] Why don’t you just say God gave cells instructions on what to do in every single situation that might arise for the rest of life’s history, and they are all automatons? The exact opposite of “so intelligent”!

DAVID: You are confused. I am presenting only God's intelligent information cells follow.

And now instead of intelligent cells we have intelligent information. Wonderful to imagine information as sentient, cognizant, capable of making decisions…Why don’t you just say….see bold above.

Photosynthesis
DAVID: Photosynthesis is so complex we are still picking apart steps we don't understand. As in origin of life it seems obvious design is required since there is no time for a Darwin style evolution caused by a series of random mutations.

dhw: I do wish you wouldn’t keep sniping at Darwin, whose random mutations theory was applied to speciation – i.e. Chapter Two of life. I have no problem with your design argument, but what has time got to do with it? We are talking about millions of millions of years! How can anyone know how long it ought to take for such a process to evolve?

DAVID: You forget I snip at Darwinists who are confused about how little Darwin knew when he wrote his book bringing to the fore the concept of common descent, an idea that had been floating around for some time. As for photosynthesis, highly complex, appearing so early after the start of life, its new short appearance timing discovery startled the Darwinist researchers who recognize it is strong evidence against random mutation as a cause. So timing has a lot to do with it. The article shows their surprise.

Darwin did not deal with photosynthesis, which has nothing to do with his theory of random mutations causing evolutionary innovation, and please tell us how you know that photosynthesis ought to have taken longer than it did. The rest of your post simply repeats your insistence that we should only consider your humanized version of God and dismiss any alternatives – all dealt with on the theodicy thread.

Chimps ‘r’ not us

QUOTE: "Just as Lucy was raised a human, Carter lived as a chimp. But, after the best part of a decade, she had to extract herself and return to her own kind. She says: “I couldn’t live in both worlds.'”

DAVID: It is a giant gap and real domestication doesn't work.

I really don’t know why anyone should be surprised that chimps are not us and we are not chimps. However, I’m about to apply for a grant that will enable me to spend a year living with a pussy cat. The purpose of this research will be to ascertain the extent to which my way of life as well as my thought processes, concepts of society, codes of morality etc., differ from that of a pussy cat. The provisional title of the book I intend to write on this subject will be Pussy Cats \'r\' Not Us. I hope you will support my application.