Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Saturday, July 31, 2021, 11:29 (1002 days ago) @ David Turell

Death is built in
DAVID: Makes my survival view quite clear.

dhw: Absolutely no connection with your survival view, which is that although all the adaptations and innovations and strategies and lifestyles are designed to enable organisms to survive, all the adaptations etc. that result in the evolution of species have nothing to do with survival.

DAVID: We don't know that adaptations for survival drive evolution!!!!! Pure Darwinist unproven theory that survival of the fittest drives evolution.

Even you have accepted that your God designed adaptations, innovations, strategies, lifestyles etc. in order to improve organisms’ chances of survival. Since you claim to believe in common descent (except when you don’t), how then can you possibly argue that the adaptations and innovations which your God preprogrammes or dabbles and which lead to speciation (one life form changing into another) have no connection with the quest for survival? You don’t need to use the word “drive”. The purpose of the changes is survival, and the mechanism that implements the changes may be your God, and may be cellular intelligence (perhaps God-given). You and I have rejected Darwin’s random mutations.

Immunity system complexity
dhw: If they remember prior results, learn from experience, and use what they have remembered and learned, what information has your God “implanted” in them?

DAVID: How to do the exactly what the bold asks. They learn from experience and respond appropriately by God's instructions.

dhw: WHAT instructions? What would be the point of them remembering and learning and using what they remember and have learned if God is going to come along anyway and tell them what to do? If he has provided them with the ABILITY to respond, then they will not need to be told what to do.

DAVID: Exactly. God's immunity instructions allow all of us to learn how to fight new infections from birth!!! mRNA covid vaccine shows it.

WHAT instructions? Here is my theistic proposal: God has given cells the ABILITY to solve problems. God has NOT given cells the SOLUTIONS to all the problems. Do you agree?

New extremophiles
DAVID: Organisms can live anywhere they wish. Life was designed to appear and survive from the beginning. Only by design.

dhw: If they can live anywhere they wish, doesn’t that suggest to you a free-for-all? And doesn’t it suggest that, if your God exists, he actually designed cells in such a way that they could live and survive by autonomously adapting to whatever conditions they encountered and by solving whatever problems came their way? Or do you believe that each of them follows instructions/is given a divine course on how to extract energy from their own special surroundings, and on how to counter every other threat to their survival?

DAVID: God initially designed life to be as tough as these examples. Your bold is exactly right and then you backtrack. Of course I believe God gave them instructions on extracting energy in many ways.

dhw: Where is the backtrack? I have proposed (the bold) that your God, if he exists, designed cells to live and survive autonomously, you say that is exactly right, and then YOU backtrack by saying he gave them instructions on how to live and survive!

DAVID: We are discussing God's implanted instructions cells do not self-invent in order to live extremely. You won't accept them.

Same as above. God has given cells the ability to solve problems. God has NOT given cells the solutions to all the problems. Do you agree?

Caterpillar memory
DAVID: Wow!!! Memories carried to the butterfly form in the discs of genome. That wasn't designed by chance. Chance could not have logically developed metamorphosis. Only a designer.

I echo your wow, but for the life of me I cannot see why your God, whose only purpose was to design humans and their food, would have preprogrammed or personally dabbled this extraordinary – but obviously efficient – process of metamorphosis. It looks to me like living proof that all forms of life find their own special ways of surviving in a great-free-for-all possibly set in motion by a designer who gave them the means to do their own designing.

Larvae use virus for immunity
QUOTE: "Putting our research together created this very interesting story about the biological arms race occurring on a very large scale between multiple pathogens, wasps, and hosts, which we now know are also fighting back,” Theilmann says.

Another wonderful example of the gigantic free-for-all, as all life forms struggle to find their own ways of survival. It’s half the story of evolution – the other half being cooperation for exactly the same purpose of survival. And yet some people can’t see the connection between evolution and the quest for survival.