New Miscellany 2: intelligent cells, cuttlefish, human feet (General)

by dhw, Saturday, May 31, 2025, 08:30 (2 days ago) @ dhw

Under “Clever corvids” now “cellular intelligence”

dhw: you insist that they [cells] 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.

DAVID: Yes, it is my God, not yours.

dhw: I understand, but when I try to link this theory with your other theory that throughout life’s history, 99.9% of his preprogramming and dabbling had nothing to do with his sole purpose, and when you argue that, for instance, the possum’s strategy of feigning death could only be God’s work – and presumably is essential for the survival of us humans – I simply cannot find any logic in your arguments. I’m sorry.

DAVID: What is essential for humans is the complex organization of all the ecosystems on Earth providing us with a food support for 8+ billion humans rising to ten billion estimated. The opossum has his niche.

For 3.X thousand million years, none of the complex ecosystems provided us with anything, because we weren’t even around then. Even today, we do not munch every species in every ecosystem. And do you really believe that your God gave the opossum a lecture on how to feign death because it was necessary for the survival of the 8+ billion humans?

Cells controlling the gut

DAVID: dhw will tell us how intelligent the T cells are. This is a complex mechanism to control satiety, a very important function to halt overeating. It needs a designer not natural evolution.

dhw: You love to use the word “natural”, by which I presume you mean that your God plays no part. This is an enormous leap. You know perfectly well that I can accept the argument that your God might be the designer of cellular intelligence. If so, what could be more “natural” than cells using their God-given intelligence to design their own modes of survival? And what could be more natural than some cell communities being unable to cope with changing conditions, whereas some can by adapting themselves or designing new ways of using the new conditions? Doesn’t that sound more feasible and less insulting than your version of evolution as an inefficient process controlled by a God who knows he’s messing things up and has to get rid of 99.9% of his designs?

DAVID: Intelligently designing evolution is not 'messing things up', but gradually replacing older forms with new better designs. 99.9% loss is not surprising.

But 99.9% of the older forms were not replaced with new better designs. They came to a dead end. As you keep agreeing and then forgetting, we and our food are descended from the 0.1% of survivors, not the 99.9% that did not survive. We’re not talking about surprises. We know the approximate extinction rate. And the question is how we explain it. Your explanation is that your omnipotent, omniscient God kept messing up his own plan to create us plus food. That is why you keep telling us he is inefficient!

Intelligent cuttlefish

QUOTES: "Once they had learnt to associate a square with a reward, the researchers switched the cues, so that the other square now became the reward cue.”
"Interestingly, the cuttlefish that learnt to adapt to this change the quickest were also the cuttlefish that were able to wait longer for the shrimp reward.”

DAVID: if a Cuttlefish is naturally programmed to lie in wait as it forages it has a built-in understanding of delayed gratification. It appears the study simply looked at an instinct.

You went on and on about “testing” the resin-using insect before you would accept that it is intelligent. Now you completely ignore the tests made on the cuttlefish (as quoted above) and focus only on a form of behaviour which would have developed naturally out of experience. The tests prove the cuttlefish’s intelligence (which unlike instinctive actions varies from individual to individual) but no, prejudice wins again.

Our special feet

QUOTE: Our cushioned heels strike the ground, and an arched sole transfers weight toward the front of our feet, propelling us forward. Our robust big toes push off into the next step, the final note in an efficient stride for long-distance locomotion.

DAVID: another aspect of our exceptionality. Mobility.

I really don’t think we are any more mobile than our four-footed friends, and I would suggest that it was not the shape of our feet that enabled us to tackle long-distance locomotion, but our desire to go further and further afield that gradually produced the changes described above. With a few exceptions (e.g. migrating birds), animals are happy to stay where they are so long as there’s enough food. Humans are curious about what lies over the hill. The pressures of bipedalism would naturally have changed the structures. It’s the same process as pre-whales’ legs turning into flippers.. Your God operates and says “Go live in the water”, whereas I propose that they go live in the water, and their legs turn into flippers. But your God may have given their cells the autonomous ability to make the changes.