Re: Kinky Orchids (or can any ID supporter explain this)


jgrisham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Gary Bohn wrote:
"jgrisham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <jgrisham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1151337026.203944.293550@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

St Onan wrote:
A flower that reproduces by contorting, then masturbating. Wouldn't
simple hermaphroditism be a much more intelligent design?

Let's say, arguably, that you are intelligent. Let's say, you commonly
go from home to work and back. If you were exclusively instinctive,
you would go exactly the same way, everytime without fail, otherwise
you'd get lost. But, you're intelligent. You may try a number of
different routes for speed, convenience, opportunity or whim. You're
not afraid of getting lost, because you're intelligent and you might
even incorporate new experiences into your future routes.
Intellligence invites variety of design.

But your friend, Darwin, says no. You are not intelligent. You are
exclusively instinctive. You try to follow the same path, everytime,
but occasionally you can get lost. And when you get lost, you usually
die. Randomly, those who get lost find their way and their new way
might be speedier, more convenient, more opportune or more enjoyable,
but that's purely accidental. You're afraid of getting lost and your
fear rules your experiences. Only through random fear can variety
accidently occur.


Are you trying to analogize selection or are you complaining about the
inherited structure of the brain? Make a choice.

What evolution has provided us with is a brain that is incredibly
plastic with not only 'instinctual' reactions to stimuli but the
rational ability to modify those reactions. This plasticity has been
selected by evolution to be a major part of our makeup.

The evidence is that intelligence is a force. That force is manifested
well in the organ of the brain, however a brain is not required. It's a
matter of fact that simple bacteria operate with nessisary intelligence
with no brain function, at all. ID can look at intelligence without the
bias of the human brain, as its only model. Currently, that's a
limitation in concept you can't approach in evolutionary biology,
because some critic is always going off the deep end, looking for God
or a designer.

I do wonder what you are talking about.

One thing you might mistake for intelligence in bacteria is something
called chemotaxis. When placed in an environment where there is
a gradient of nutriants, bacteria swim toward the higher concentration
of nutriants. But this isn't what would generally be called
intelligence.
You probably know about flagella by now but how are they
coordinated to get the bacterium to move in the appropriate
direction?

Chemotaxis works roughly like this. There are receptors on
the outside of cells. They recognize nutriant molecules. When
they are at a higher concentration on one side of a cell than
on the other, this induces a number of phosphorylation events
which trigger a chain of other phosphorylation events that
wind up inducing movement in the direction of the gradient.
We could discuss CheY and CheW, receptor mediated
phosphorylation, conformational changes and short half-lived
phosphorylated amino acids but those are just details.
The bottom line is that a series of molecules react in well
defined ways to a chemical environment. In the case of
chemotaxis, this produces a useful result. But it isn't
problem solving, it's programming. Bacteria are chemically
destined to behave this way.

The same might be said for plants that follow the sun. The
biochemistry is understood. It's a response to stimulus not
significantly different than the response of your eyes to
increasing or decreasing levels of light --- your pupil either
contracts or dialates accordingly. Nobody consideres pupils
dialating or contracting to be intelligence. Why would you
consider analogous responses to stimuli intelligence in
bacteria or plants?

.

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