New Miscellany 2: birds, chimps, snails etc., astrocytes (General)

by dhw, Thursday, May 29, 2025, 11:05 (4 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You are proposing the birds say "winter is bad, let's look for a better winter spot." And gradually it becomes long distance. That is conceptualizing more than birds might be capable of, but it might work.

dhw: There’s no “conceptualizing”! They find that travelling a short distance makes no difference. They still freeze. So they look further afield. They learn, as we do, from experience. What is your alternative?

DAVID: You just parroted me. I said looking afield might work.

“It might work” refers to my proposal, which was in answer to your question: “How did they learn what is needed? No answer. What did the birds do to ‘learn’?” Please don’t try to take credit for a theory which obviously hadn’t occurred to you.

DAVID: Ten and twenty K miles migrations are giant hops. Actually for most of those, there are closer destinations. Did the birds make mistakes or just God assigning them a route?

Now what are you proposing? Yet another example of your omniscient God’s inefficiency or in this case sheer ignorance?

Chimps ‘r’ not us

DAVID: Yes brain, but our exceptional bodies allow exceptional movements formalized in gymnastics.

dhw: And dogs’ noses allow exceptional sensitivity to smell. What is your point, other than to accuse me of “abhorring” our exceptionality because I say it is our brain power that makes us exceptional.

DAVID: Plus our amazing physical capacities. We are more than you recognize.

dhw: I could add to my dogs, cheetahs and camels a list of animals with far more “amazing physical capacities” than ours. So what? Do you think it’s our ability to turn somersaults and do a Fosbury Flop that has given us dominion over the Earth?

DAVID: Of course it is our amazing extraordinary brain.

Thank you. End of discussion.

Armored deep-sea snails

DAVID: I see whole organisms responding to new conditions. (dhw’s bold)

dhw: Of course. So do I. And whole organisms are composed of cells, and we know that the cells change in response to new conditions. But you believe they only do so when God preprogrammes them or fiddles with them or gives them lessons.

DAVID: God speciates.

dhw: Speciation restructures whole organisms, which are composed of cell communities, in response to new conditions. You agree, but your God preprogrammed every one 3.8 billion years ago (having looked into his crystal ball to foresee every future change in conditions), or he pops in to dabble, though 99.9% of his preprogramming and/or dabbles have nothing to do with his sole purpose, but hey, let’s just call that inefficiency.

DAVID: You keep forgetting evolution naturally culls at that rate.

You keep forgetting that your first-cause God, if he exists, invented the process of evolution, and you are the one who insists that the process is not “natural” but is controlled by him in a totally incomprehensible, illogical and inefficient manner.

Clever corvids

DAVID: Our cells only look conscious.

dhw: They look conscious, they act conscious, but you know they ain’t conscious.

DAVID: Do you know they are? It can all be intelligent programming.

Nobody knows. But you insist that they can’t possibly be intelligent. I accept that intelligence is still an unproven theory, but I find it far more convincing than your own theory that your God preprogrammed every response 3.8 billion years ago, or popped in to give courses and /or perform operations.

Parrot talk
dhw: Most of this fascinating article is devoted to how parrots understand human language. But I find the above quote equally fascinating. ALL our fellow creatures communicate with one another. I just wish we humans could understand their forms of language as well as parrots understand ours. Amazingly, some humans are not even clever enough to realize that squeaks, squawks, whistles etc. also denote the same conscious communication as ours, albeit on a vastly reduced scale.

DAVID: Agreed.

Thank you.

More astrocyte studies

QUOTE: “'There’s specificity to [astrocytes] being able to turn on and off the different knobs,” Guttenplan says. “It has effects on [neural] circuits as well as on whole animal behavior.”

DAVID: The final point of the article tells us do not ignore any facet of an organism. From a design standpoint everything we see is there for a reason.

Of course it is. That is central to the theory of evolution – that whatever is useful will survive – and I agree with you completely that it denotes design. What it also denotes is a) how much all brains from fruit flies, zebra fish and mice to us human beings have in common, and b) the complex communications between the different cells and their influence on behaviour. The first of these provides yet more evidence for common descent, while the second seems to me to provide yet more evidence that cells and cell communities use their own intelligence, as they combine and communicate in making the decisions that influence behaviour. From a design standpoint, this makes perfect sense, as does the argument that such a complex mechanism itself must have been designed – which we may take as evidence for the existence of a designer God.