We are not nearly as determined by our genes as once thought.

Posting links would not have the same impact. Sometimes a swift kick in the pants works.

Thanks Dad.

Steve, you really need to do some self examination.  Your arrogance is astounding for someone as wholly ignorant as you appear to be based on your written words.

This is saying that all the information for this process, rather than coming from a preexisting construction plan and "blueprint", comes from the collective intelligence of the cells involved improvising and creating in real time during the development process. 

It seems to me that it is self evident that the information conveying the "construction plan" of living organisms must be stored somewhere in the first cell in embryogenesis. It may not all be in the DNA (it has long seemed that the total information in the DNA isn't sufficient), but it must be somewhere in the fertilized egg cell.

nbtruthman,

Your recent posts in this thread and in the "Darwin" thread have been very well-written and you have argued your points well.  I have profited by reading them and understanding their point of view.  I have been a long-time critic of the Dembski version of ID (and even more so his recent version of IR).

Kindly, I disagree with your assumption that the information is stored in a single location.  Let me try a crude example.  

Two people are on a damaged boat in a storm.  One individual pulls out a plastic package about the size of a bread box (are they real in modern days?) and declares an escape from the boat.  The other person responds with, " I don't see how a small volume object like that will support the two of us?"

Of course when triggered, the inflatable raft quickly expands to many times its initial size.  All the extra "size" was there as gases in the ambient environment.

Living things work in a cybernetic way exchanging information as a primary biological drive.  Positive - and especially negative - feedback are the basis of learning.  An organism is always in a sea of information (infosphere).  Organisms make their information larger during development by constant exploration and acquisition.  

These instinctual responses anticipate the functionality of biological processes.  Living things aren't linearly executed programs --- they are massive consumers of negative entropy found everywhere in their external and internal environments.

Dennis Nobel is a founder of The Third Way of Evolution and he has influenced my views on evolution.

To read about how DNA/RNA/Ribosome systems do these amazing strategic things try - Third Way member Lynn Caporale's book: Darwin in the Genome. 

 LUDDEN: So are you saying that modern science has discovered even perhaps greater links between humans and animals, if not plants, than Darwin imagined?

Dr. CAPORALE: Yes. I think that one of the most beautiful things that I found by looking at DNA sequences is the tremendous sense of connection with all life on Earth.

 

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor...Id=4671315
http://www.darwingenome.net/
http://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/pe...a-caporale

Two people are on a damaged boat in a storm.  One individual pulls out a plastic package about the size of a bread box (are they real in modern days?) and declares an escape from the boat.  The other person responds with, " I don't see how a small volume object like that will support the two of us?"

Of course when triggered, the inflatable raft quickly expands to many times its initial size.  All the extra "size" was there as gases in the ambient environment.

Unfortunately, your example actually exemplifies my point that the construction information for living organisms must be stored somewhere in the first cell of an organism's development. All the information describing and specifying the resulting final inflated lifesaving raft is indeed entirely contained within the breadbox sized container of the folded up inflatable raft and the tank of compressed air, in the form of their fine and larger scale structure including chemical composition. The final form of the lifesaving inflated raft is entirely predictable from the information contained in the original box. This design information doesn't originate from the environment (except in the sense that the design performance requirements themselves were derived by an agent in part from the properties of seawater and storm waves).

 An organism is always in a sea of information (infosphere).  Organisms make their information larger during development by constant exploration and acquisition.

These instinctual responses anticipate the functionality of biological processes.  Living things aren't linearly executed programs --- they are massive consumers of negative entropy found everywhere in their external and internal environments.

This still begs the question of where exactly did all the information for the development from the first cell to the embryo to the final animal containing hundreds of millions of specialized cells in a massive system of subsystems actually came from. This is generalizations. The "sea of information" is coded how in what substrate? What exactly is it that does this constant exploration and acquisition and consumption? The very terms imply some sort of agents or entities.  

The very intricate irreducibly complex construction design required some sort of originating process which seems to have incorporated some form of creative intelligence. What is this and if it is the cells or organisms themselves how exactly did they come to somehow produce this massive amount of complex specified information? How can something invent itself (not including the discredited blind neo-Darwinistic process)? 

This sort of concept doesn't seem to me to itself contain much information.

Unfortunately, your example actually exemplifies my point that the construction information for living organisms must be stored somewhere in the first cell of an organism's development. All the information describing and specifying the resulting final inflated lifesaving raft is indeed entirely contained within the breadbox sized container of the folded up inflatable raft and the tank of compressed air, in the form of their fine and larger scale structure including chemical composition.

This still begs the question of where exactly did all the information for the development from the first cell to the embryo to the final animal containing hundreds of millions of specialized cells in a massive system of subsystems actually came from. This is generalizations. The "sea of information" is coded how in what substrate? What exactly is it that does this constant exploration and acquisition and consumption? The very terms imply some sort of agents or entities.  

The very intricate irreducibly complex construction design required some sort of originating process which seems to have incorporated some form of creative intelligence.

Ok - thank you again for a solid response.  Working backwards from the points in your post.  I have more than 25 years of bashing neoDarwinism under my belt.  I believe I have a firm grasp in how it is wrong.

As for Darwin's theory, NS is an actual influence, when understood as part of propensity theory.  Natural Selection is nothing more than saying natural outcomes - are natural outcomes according to successful behavior of a species in an ever-changing environment.  But it not some "force" from "itself".  It is just positive (or negative) outcomes from environmental engagement.

 In this paper, I agree that natural selection, as the prevailing theory of how evolutionary change occurs, is generally described in a manner that is tautological or circular. I suggest below, however, how to save natural selection from tautology or circularity. This comes at a cost, which is to accept that natural selection theory is not currently predictive in the way that mature scientific theories should be. I also suggest a rough outline of how natural selection theory may become more predictive.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594354/

 Responses to the tautology critique have varied from no response (the most common) to Gould's appeal to “a priori engineering principles,” to Lipton and Thompson's filter theory approach, to an explanation of fitness as “expected fitness” rather than actual fitness. I’ve addressed above how Gould's and Lipton and Thompson's approaches fail. However, the “expected fitness” approach, often described as the “propensity approach” or “propensity interpretation” of fitness, goes part way toward resolving the issues I’ve described. Resolving the tautology problem for natural selection requires that we more closely examine the concept of fitness.
Brandon and Ramsey (2007)17 defend the propensity interpretation of fitness, which was developed specifically to resolve the tautology problem:

The prime motivation [for introducing the propensity interpretation] was to make room for an explanatory theory of natural selection, which is tantamount to solving the so-called “tautology problem.” This problem arises from a casual inspection of the phrase “survival of the fittest” and then asking what defines the fittest. If the answer is those that reproduce the most, then it seems we are explaining a phenomenon, differential reproduction, in terms of itself, which is no explanation at all.”

Living things designed themselves as part of ecological biosystems.  (see ecological psychology)

I argue against the model of self-sufficient stored information in every cell; and for a model of direct perception by living agents.  In this way the minds (no matter how simple) of livings are not information itself, but transformers of ambient information.

Ok - thank you again for a solid response.  Working backwards from the points in your post.  I have more than 25 years of bashing neoDarwinism under my belt.  I believe I have a firm grasp in how it is wrong.

As for Darwin's theory, NS is an actual influence, when understood as part of propensity theory.  Natural Selection is nothing more than saying natural outcomes - are natural outcomes according to successful behavior of a species in an ever-changing environment.  But it not some "force" from "itself".  It is just positive (or negative) outcomes from environmental engagement.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594354/


Living things designed themselves as part of ecological biosystems.  (see ecological psychology)

I argue against the model of self-sufficient stored information in every cell; and for a model of direct perception by living agents.  In this way the minds (no matter how simple) of livings are not information itself, but transformers of ambient information.

This is mostly an argument by simple assertion, and there is no response to my specific questions. You are suggesting that even the simplest living single celled organisms are capable of direct perception. In order to perceive, they must have minds of some simple sort. What is the ultimate nature of these minds and how did they themselves originate? Further, how do countless billions of them get together and collectively form a conscious entity or entities that can focus on coming up with a design that solves specific problems?

However, I admit that the sheer magnitude of the collective data processing power of the DNA of all organisms on Earth gives me pause.

“An Estimate of the Total DNA of the Biosphere.” - paper at https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar...io.1002168 . There is an article on this - Earth’s Biosphere Is Awash in Information. Excerpts:  

In this remarkable paper, Landenmark, Forgan, and Cockell of the United Kingdom Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh attempt “An Estimate of the Total DNA of the Biosphere.” The results are staggering:
“Modern whole-organism genome analysis, in combination with biomass estimates, allows us to estimate a lower bound on the total information content in the biosphere: 5.3 × 10^31 (±3.6 × 10^31) megabases (Mb) of DNA. Given conservative estimates regarding DNA transcription rates, this information content suggests biosphere processing speeds exceeding yottaNOPS values (10^24 Nucleotide Operations Per Second).,,,”
,,,let’s ponder the scale of this information content and processing speed. A yottaNOPS is a lotta ops! Each prefix multiplies the prior one by a thousand: kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta. A “yottabase” doesn’t even come close to the raw information content of DNA they estimate: 10^31 megabases. That’s the same as 10^37 bases, but a yottabase is only 10^24 bases (a trillion trillion bases). This means that the information content of the biosphere is 50 x 10^13 yottabases (500 trillion yottabases). They estimate that living computers perform a yottaNOPS, or 10^24 nucleotide operations per second, on this information.
You can pick yourself off the floor now.,,,
“Storing the total amount of information encoded in DNA in the biosphere, 5.3 × 10^31 megabases (Mb), would require approximately 10^21 supercomputers with the average storage capacity of the world’s four most powerful supercomputers.”
How much land surface would be required for 10^21 supercomputers (a “zetta-computer”)? The Titan supercomputer takes up 404 m^2 of space. If we assume just 100 m^2 for each supercomputer, we would still need 10^23 square meters to hold them all. Universe Today estimates the total surface of Earth (including the oceans) at 510 million km^2, which equates to 5.1 x 10^14 m^2. That’s 9 orders of magnitude short of the zetta-computer footprint, meaning we would need a billion Earths to have enough space for all the computers needed to match the equivalent computing power life performs on DNA!"

Of course, mere raw digital data processing power of any magnitude still doesn't equate to the focused sentient and conscious intelligence having intentionality and ingenuity that seems to have to have been responsible for the origin of much of the incredibly intricate irreducibly complex biological designs that exist in nature (the good old Hard Problem of consciousness studies). Information processing (of any degree) just does not amount to consciousness. Different existential categories. 

And we know for sure of no other possible origin for such Complex Specified Information (CSI) - there is no plausible alternate theory, even though Darwinism has long been touted for that role.

This is mostly an argument by simple assertion, and there is no response to my specific questions. You are suggesting that even the simplest living single celled organisms are capable of direct perception. In order to perceive, they must have minds of some simple sort. What is the ultimate nature of these minds and how did they themselves originate? Further, how do countless billions of them get together and collectively form a conscious entity or entities that can focus on coming up with a design that solves specific problems?

As I understand the process, a single celled-organism must use its very limited mental capability in order to have a drive for food and for safety.  These actions involve a connection to a future physical state, based on information patterns where the organism enforces future goals by directed actions.  Intention goes all the way down to the start of living animals and is the viewpoint for mental evolution.

Intentions are logical constructions about behavior and timing.  The intentions of a living thing can be measured and modeled in information science.  Hence, the continuing long-road in gathering data and parsing it.  In my humble opinion, once a focus takes a popular hold by some bright young people-- pattern recognition, linguistics (the science of language), and behavioral analysis will enable clearer models for Psychology to return from the cold.  The creativity of living things will stand in complementarity with determined habits that preserve ecological niches.

Your next question of how a mind is formed from many cells.......is outta my pay grade.  It seems to me to be like light and relativity theory.  No matter how fast you are going, "speed" is warping time and space to make you related.  No matter how many cells an organism has, it has a relative and universal influence over the whole organism.

I assert there is powerful, if limited, computing power in the earth's bacterial and virus communities.  And I do think they solve problems, slowly, and they adapt to life quite well.  And science now shows us the truth -- "bugs" are some significant part of each and everyone of us.  Evolution has helped itself to the bits of code from bacteria and used them in our genes.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/T...1476776620

As I understand the process, a single celled-organism must use its very limited mental capability in order to have a drive for food and for safety.  These actions involve a connection to a future physical state, based on information patterns where the organism enforces future goals by directed actions.  Intention goes all the way down to the start of living animals and is the viewpoint for mental evolution.

Intentions are logical constructions about behavior and timing.  The intentions of a living thing can be measured and modeled in information science.  Hence, the continuing long-road in gathering data and parsing it.  In my humble opinion, once a focus takes a popular hold by some bright young people-- pattern recognition, linguistics (the science of language), and behavioral analysis will enable clearer models for Psychology to return from the cold.  The creativity of living things will stand in complementarity with determined habits that preserve ecological niches.

Your next question of how a mind is formed from many cells.......is outta my pay grade.  It seems to me to be like light and relativity theory.  No matter how fast you are going, "speed" is warping time and space to make you related.  No matter how many cells an organism has, it has a relative and universal influence over the whole organism.

I assert there is powerful, if limited, computing power in the earth's bacterial and virus communities.  And I do think they solve problems, slowly, and they adapt to life quite well.  And science now shows us the truth -- "bugs" are some significant part of each and everyone of us.  Evolution has helped itself to the bits of code from bacteria and used them in our genes.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/T...1476776620

I disagree. The essence of intentionality is consciousness - only a conscious agent can have an intention or desire.  In metaphysics, the term means "pertaining to an appearance, phenomenon or representation in the mind".

Mechanisms have logical structures and can carry out logical operations toward some goals, but these structures and goals didn't originate themselves, and structures and mechanisms are fundamentally incapable of desiring anything. They don't have minds. Since intentionality is a property of consciousness, it fundamentally can't be measured directly. Only its works or its products, its behavior and the timing of this behavior can be scientifically measured. 

Since the extremely complicated mechanism of the cell is still a mechanism, it doesn't look like it can have any degree of consciousness or awareness or mind.  So the question still remains, how can cells, or even extremely large groups of cells collectively, carry out actions requiring intentionality? Not even to speak of the other requisite qualities required for macroevolution such as the insight and creativity needed to originate new intricate irreducibly complex biological mechanisms.  

It seems to me that you end up with some sort of panpsychism, suggesting that all matter has some fundamental degree of consciousness, but this just kicks the can down the road as far as the mysteries of what consciousness really is and how aggregates of a lot of little bits of simple consciousness can add up to highly intelligent conscious entities.

I disagree. The essence of intentionality is consciousness - only a conscious agent can have an intention or desire. 

Since intentionality is a property of consciousness, it fundamentally can't be measured directly. Only its works or its products, its behavior and the timing of this behavior can be scientifically measured. 

Since the extremely complicated mechanism of the cell is still a mechanism, it doesn't look like it can have any degree of consciousness or awareness or mind.  So the question still remains, how can cells, or even extremely large groups of cells collectively, carry out actions requiring intentionality? Not even to speak of the other requisite qualities required for macroevolution such as the insight and creativity needed to originate new intricate irreducibly complex biological mechanisms.  

It seems to me that you end up with some sort of panpsychism......

Starting from the last point you made, my position is strongly against panpsychism, even if it is recently popular.

When the word "consciousness" is used, I don't see it as substitute for the word soul.  To me, it is bio-observation of the "mechanisms" of sense.  Self-awareness is you - experiencing you.  It is information processing - that is turned in - on itself for an "inner" viewpoint.  Life is a more fundamental thing that just trying to take in the experience of it.  I think that the doings and strivings themselves are the fundamentals.

Those things, which have really been deeply lived by me, I only remember the experiencing after the fact.  When lived to the full, those moments are when self-concern is at a low.  At those deeply felt moments it is not a pulling inward to the self, but a breakdown in barriers.  The organism and its environment are more closely integrated and are one in the same, as part of the same niche.

Having a modern Kant sort out biology's metaphysics would be nice. But right in front of us, is a newly revealed language of life.  The creativity of living things manipulates information about its environments and includes it into the genome.  This how it works.  And this means adaptation is right out of Lamarck in some ways.  Mind builds "information objects" and information objects organize biological functions.

An interesting article on biology and information...not sure how to quote b/c FT has stringent copy rules:

https://www.ft.com/content/18a58ac4-18cc...351a53f1c3

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https://www.ft.com/content/18a58ac4-18cc...351a53f1c3

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