Barbarian asks:
Do you think and egg and sperm are intelligent?
(affirms it)
You said that about phototropism in plants, and like egg and sperm, it turned out to be chemical.
It's demonstrably true. We know chemically how it works. BTW, the interaction of egg and sperm also works chemically.
Sperm-egg fusion: events at the plasma membrane
December 15, 2004 J Cell Sci 117, 6269-6274.
Kathryn K. Stein1,*,
Paul Primakoff2 and
Diana Myles1,‡
Summary
Sperm-egg fusion is a cell-cell membrane fusion event essential for the propagation of sexually reproducing organisms. In gamete fusion, as in other fusion events, such as virus-cell and intracellular vesicle fusion, membrane fusion is a two-step process. Attachment of two membranes through cell-surface molecules is followed by the physical merger of the plasma membrane lipids. Recent progress has demonstrated an essential role for an oocyte tetraspanin, CD9, in mouse sperm-egg fusion, and a specific molecular site crucial for CD9 function has been identified. Absence of glycosylphosphatidylinositol-anchored proteins on the oocyte surface also results in loss of oocyte fusion competence in this gamete. These discoveries provide a strong starting point for the identification of additional proteins that have roles in sperm-egg fusion.
A purposive action or process cannot be the mere production of a chemical.
Up to you. These are mechanisms mediated by chemicals. You can decide what it means, but it's all chemical.
Sperm meets egg WITH AND FOR A PURPOSE. Without said purpose, sperm would never meet egg.
You're confusing causes, and it's causing you no end of trouble here. Science studies efficient causes, that is, why it happens in the physical universe. Phototropism is causes by the chemical reactions of auxins.
There is also a final cause; God created the universe so that we might become the sort of beings who could be happy with us in heaven. To that end, he made things work as they do, complete with efficient causes.
How did the powering instincts (I'm prepared to listen if you have a better word)
a. originate and
As you see, natural selection and random mutation. Plants that had the photosensitive auxins were more efficient at using light, and crowded out less fit plants.
enter the genome (assuming that's where it is).
Mutation that made the auxins more sensitive to light.
Here is an asexually reproducing organism. No sperm, no eggs.
Here is a sexually reproducing organism: both sperm and eggs.
Q. How did the second 'evolve' from the first? Or did it?
Yep. The simplest sexually-reproducing organisms don't need to do sexual reproduction, they mostly reproduce asexually. But they can do conjugation, in which genetic material is shared.
Some more advanced organisms depend on sexual reproduction more often. And a few actually require sexual reproduction (many animals and plants)
Even today we see these transitionals living and reproducing.
But they don't know that. They do what they do instinctively and no amount of fudging can escape that fact.
You've decided that chemical reactions that affect organisms' behavior is "instinct." Since "instinct" usually means "we don't know why it works." You're welcome to use it, but science needs more precise information than that. So we describe the chemical mechanisms that do it.
So the questions stand. How did the instinctive behaviour 'evolve' and enter the genome?
Darwin discovered it wasn't by chance, yes.
Darwin didn't know what he meant, and tied himself up in knots because he couldn't square the circles;
See above. When we found out why those "instincts" work, it turned out to be selectable by natural selection. Darwin's prediction was validated.
Darwin wrote -
“Mere chance, as we may call it, might cause one variety to differ in some character from its parents, and the offspring of this variety again to differ from its parent in the very same character and in a greater degree; but this alone would never account for so habitual and large a degree of difference as that between the species of the same genus.†And, “I was so convinced that not even a stripe of colour appears from what is commonly called chance.â€
“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.â€
He's saying the same thing in both passages.
As I keep pointing out, and you can't deny it, instinct is immaterial.
As your two examples show, it's chemical.
Barbarian chuckles:
So because man can’t yet make a computer more intelligent than a man, you think God can’t make a world where intelligence arises from His creation?
And will you cease to believe in God, if man should find a way to make a computer smarter than he is? Think.
A computer can't. It can copy - but that's it.
No, that's wrong.
Let Darwinism loose in an electronics lab and just watch what it
creates. A lean, mean machine that nobody understands. Clive Davidson
reports
"GO!" barks the researcher into the microphone. The oscilloscope in
front of him displays a steady green line across the top of its
screen. "Stop!" he says and the line immediately drops to the bottom.
Between the microphone and the oscilloscope is an electronic circuit
that discriminates between the two words. It puts out 5 volts when it
hears "go" and cuts off the signal when it hears "stop".
It is unremarkable that a microprocessor can perform such a
task--except in this case. Even though the circuit consists of only a
small number of basic components, the researcher, Adrian Thompson,
does not know how it works. He can't ask the designer because there
wasn't one. Instead, the circuit evolved from a "primordial soup" of
silicon components guided by the principles of genetic variation and
survival of the fittest.
http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=73
But you didn't answer my question about chaos being more intelligent and containing more info than order and intelligence.
In my postgrad work I had to do a lot of things with chaotic systems. You've wrongly assumed that order and chaos are opposites. But there is deep and important order in chaos:
In common usage, "chaos" means "a state of disorder".[23] However, in chaos theory, the term is defined more precisely. Although there is no universally accepted mathematical definition of chaos, a commonly used definition says that, for a dynamical system to be classified as chaotic, it must have the following properties:[24]
it must be sensitive to initial conditions;
it must be topologically mixing; and
its periodic orbits must be dense.
The requirement for sensitive dependence on initial conditions implies that there is a set of initial conditions of positive measure which do not converge to a cycle of any length.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
I ran into a particularly difficult issue that later turned out to be a consequence of Feigenbaum's number. Look it up and learn.
In fact, they confirm Darwin's finding that every individual is different than its parents.
A few thousand years, and we have produced dogs, maize, and other species. So you've missed again.
Did I hear you say 'new species. genera' or anything else?
Yep. Maize is new species. There never was "wild corn"; it evolved from a form of grass.
You don't have a clue, do you?
See above.
(objection that we never see horses get wings)
If it happened, Darwinian theory would be in big trouble, as you learned earlier.
(Drug accusations)
C'mon. Co-operate with the mods.
Birds fly (starting with the very first bird). THEY COULD NOT DO SO IF THEY DID NOT HAVE A PERFECTLY FORMED FLYING INSTINCT FUNCTIONING PERFECTLY.
Even today, there are birds that are very poor at flying, but can manage to do it a little. So your argument fails by counter-example.
Do you agree with that statement or not?
Reality disagrees with it.
Barbarian observes:
As you learned, fish evolved lungs before there were any land animals.
See above.
Identifiable lungfish are lungfish, and have lungs. The oldest known fossil of a lungfish dates from the Devonian period (417 to 354 million years ago). Apart from the unsual specific and generic variations, there is no difference between a lungfish of today and one that lived 350 million years ago.
That isn't consistent with the fossils we have. Show me a lungfish fossil that is identical to any of the lungfish living today. But you should understand that lungs are much older than lungfish. Northern Snakeheads have very primitive lungs, mere outpocketings in the upper digestive tract. But they work, and allow the fish to move about on land.
One notable lungfish feature, lungs, has led to considerable speculation and debate on their relationship to tetrapods. Although largely discredited today, several 20th Century authorities championed the idea that tetrapods descended from lungfish-like ancestors.
Don't know of any. Lungfish seem to have split off from the fish that led to tetrapods. However, the are very close to our ancestors; gentically, we are more closely related to lungfish than lungfish are related to other fish. And we know that is an indicator, because we can verify it with organisms of known descent.
So that's up the Swanee. You're still going with them?
Comes down to evidence.
Barbarian suggests:
You were asked to show a little restraint in your behavior. You aren't the slave of your emotions.
You were asked to remove your condescension. You aren't the slave of your ego.
I haven't twitted you for being ignorant lately.
Barbarian observes:
You called phototropism "instinct" and I showed you it's a chemical process. So your assumption is disproven.
I have shown you that that is a nonsensical 'disproof'. I would stop raising it if I were you.
It's an example of what you think is "instinct", and it's entirely chemical.
Doesn't matter whether you conflated the two or not. What you call "instinct" turned out to be chemical reactions.
Demonstrably so. And what we haven't yet discovered, does not remove the fact that what you call "instinct" has a chemical mechanism.
Barbarian observes:
Because the plants that did not, were at a competitive disadvantage with the plants that did, and were replaced by the more efficient ones.
So plants didn't have roots that grew downwards, and then developed roots that did.
A plant that sent out many roots in all directions could live, but it would be more efficient if it only sent them down. An advantage.
Or shoots that grew toward the light, and then that behaviour 'evolved'.
A plant that grows in all directions can live, but one that grows toward the light is more efficient and likely to survive, yes.
You might also like to read up on the appearance of the angiosperms when you have the time.
Archaefructus liaoningensis is transitional between flowering plants and more primitive ones.
Science 3 May 2002:
Vol. 296 no. 5569 p. 821
Fossil Plant Hints How First Flowers Bloomed
Erik Stokstad
A remarkably well-preserved fossil from China promises to unveil the murky ancestry of the most diverse group of plants, the angiosperms, in a surprising way. The 125-million-year-old plant--which a team of paleontologists describes on page 899 --suggests that the forebears of flowering plants may have been aquatic, weedy herbs.
Do you find it remarkable that such transitionals only show up where they are predicted by evolutionary theory. Scientists do. It's one important reason that they accept the theory.
Barbarian observes:
Doesn't have to. Chemical reactions don't depend on knowing. What you call "instinct" is just chemical reactions.
I can't decide whether you're just being silly, or clueless. Probably the latter.
C'mon. Cooperate with the mods.
Geotropism works the same way; differential distribution of auxins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitropism
Good. It 'works' that way. WHY does it work that way and no other?
Efficient cause is mutation and natural selection. Final cause is God creating a universe in which such wonders can appear.
Science does the efficient causes. Faith will give you the final cause. Simple.
Assuming you're willing to put in the work to learn about it.
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