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The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

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Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#171

Post by basil-rash »

carapace wrote: post #159
basil-rash wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is objectively false. Evolution explains absolutely nothing creationism doesn’t, and creationism explains a whole lot that evolution cannot. For instance, universal origins and the formation of cells.

Creationism doesn't explain anything. You don't have to take evolution on faith. You can write a computer program that demonstrates that selection among almost-but-not-quite identical entities with heritable properties generates adaptive forms. Many people have. DNA is real. Reproducing lifeforms are real. We know how they work in some detail. There's no faith required.

Please understand the discussion at hand before commenting. Nobody is denying the existence of small-scale "micro-evolution" that subtly guides species into local optima. The question is of abiogenesis and mass-speciation, topics evolutionism has been thoroughly unable to explain, despite many attempts.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#172

Post by basil-rash »

dekhn wrote: post #153
basil-rash wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is objectively false. Evolution explains absolutely nothing creationism doesn’t, and creationism explains a whole lot that evolution cannot. For instance, universal origins and the formation of cells.

Could you show us an experiment that would demonstrate creationism is a better explanation than evolution (and random chance) for the formation of cells? If you can't come up with an actual experiment, there's really no way to say that creationism "explains" something.

Creationism explains everything very simply: "X is the way it is because God ordained it to be". There is no need to experimentally verify, its existence is the proof. In general, the need for experimental evidence is only present when you've accepted the lack of external intervention as axiomatic. When that very axiom is under debate, experimentalism is entirely irrelevant.

Not to mention, anything I present as being evidence of intelligence being more able to produce functional complexity than randomness you would reinterpret as "randomness-that-produced-something-that-look-like-intelligence producing functional complexity better than randomness-that-doesnt-look-like-intelligence".

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#173

Post by basil-rash »

dekhn wrote: post #152
basil-rash wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It most certainly is. Evolutionists believe in the time invariance of the laws of physics with no proof, creationists believe the processes by why things have changed in the universe (“physics”, broadly) have changed over time, also with no proof. That there is some external influence that we cannot directly observe that has some massive impact on the development of the universe in ways we cannot explain. (Funnily, p…

The reason we believe in time invariance of the laws of physics is based on observation of old structures in the universe (at least we only have to look back about 4 billion years to the beginning of evolution on earth). So far we have not found any convincing evidence that the laws have changed (either new or different interactions, or the strength of the interactions). I will say all of science is based on faith- t…

I fear you are failing to comprehend how fundamental the axiom in question (is the universal state influenced by actors beyond our comprehension?) really is. There is no experiment that can answer it, any and all observations must be looked at under a lens that is fundamentally influenced by your answer to the question.

We can certainly say that the observations look like they may have progressed at the rate we expect for the past 13 billion years, but that does nothing to exclude the possibility that around 6,000 years ago some actor we do not understand took 1 week to craft everything we observe now to be precisely how it is.

Reading your final paragraph, I believe we are more aligned than I previously thought. :)

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#174

Post by treprinum »

cmrx64 wrote: post #154
treprinum wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Covid hit me, it felt like having a stroke and the effect was that I suddenly perceived that I don't have enough energy to sustain vision, instead I could perceive the delineation between object localization, object recognition, character-to-text conversion etc. It was like the brain was an engine that suddenly lacked fuel (I could force individual parts to "work" at the cost of immense pain) and dissolved into…

had a relatable but almost opposite experience (no obvious infection, but it was winter 20/21), where I noticed that objects in my visual field seemed to be differentiating themselves away from the background and “competing” for my attention when previously I had to go hunt for them.

October 2020 here. I guess you got a boost whereas I got an obstruction of whatever was delivering energy.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#175

Post by samatman »

basil-rash wrote: post #170
samatman wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that the Bible is the literal and inspired word of God, correct in every detail?

It's certainly inspired, but it has been subject to the chaotic nature of humanity, as has everything since the fall.

Close enough.

You're trying to package your religion as something which it isn't. Creationism is Christian theology, not science. People know this. On some level, you know this.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#176

Post by lmiller1990 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #99
seatac76 wrote: post #13

Fantastic read! If y’all are into this kind of stuff I highly recommend reading “The Song of the cell” by Siddhartha Mukherjee[1], it is one of the best books I’ve read that made the topic of biology approachable. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Song-Cell-Exploration-Medicine-Human/...

What does this book talk about that his previous book the Gene doesn’t?

I found Song of the Cell a bit underwhelming. The Gene really was fantastic - I think he ran out of steam a bit with Song of the Cell. The majority of the cell related history is also contained in The Gene.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#177

Post by carapace »

basil-rash wrote: post #171
carapace wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creationism doesn't explain anything. You don't have to take evolution on faith. You can write a computer program that demonstrates that selection among almost-but-not-quite identical entities with heritable properties generates adaptive forms. Many people have. DNA is real. Reproducing lifeforms are real. We know how they work in some detail. There's no faith required.

Please understand the discussion at hand before commenting. Nobody is denying the existence of small-scale "micro-evolution" that subtly guides species into local optima. The question is of abiogenesis and mass-speciation, topics evolutionism has been thoroughly unable to explain, despite many attempts.

I do understand the discussion. You don't seem to understand what explanation is. Saying "God did it" doesn't explain the origin of life. We may never have a scientific explanation for how life arose. It may be that it was an act of God (which, for what it's worth, I personally believe) but that doesn't explain it. There are limits to human knowledge, and faith transcends those limits. You seem to confuse faith and science and put them in some sort of competition with each other, they're not, they are both approaches to the Truth.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#178

Post by patcon »

talkingtab wrote: post #45

The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building…

> But I don't think of myself as a CAS or talk about We. Wecellfs?

I am a collector of theories of consciousness :) assuming your quote above is making reference to the "scale" at which "self" is understood, you might be interested in this theory:

Information Closure Theory of Consciousness (2020) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342956066_Informati...

This reddit comment sums it up better than the paper seems to be able to: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/dco3t1/com...

> Consciousness (at least, consciousness(es) that we are familiar with) seems to occur at a certain scale. Conscious states doesn't seem to significantly covary with noisy schocastic activities of individual cells and such; rather it seems to covary at with macro-level patterns and activities emerging from a population of neurons and stuffs. We are not aware of how we precisely process information (like segmenting images, detecting faces, recognizing speeches), or perform actions (like precise motor controls and everything). We are aware of things at a much higher scale. However, consciousness doesn't seem to exist at an overly macro-level scale either (like, for example, we won't think that USA is conscious).

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#179

Post by basil-rash »

samatman wrote: post #175
basil-rash wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly inspired, but it has been subject to the chaotic nature of humanity, as has everything since the fall.

Close enough. You're trying to package your religion as something which it isn't. Creationism is Christian theology, not science. People know this. On some level, you know this.

Of course I know that. And further I know evolutionism is the same. Indeed I opened this entire thread with the statement: "both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way."

It would seem you are not paying attention to what is actually being said.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#180

Post by qlk1123 »

patcon wrote: post #178
talkingtab wrote: post #45

The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building…

> But I don't think of myself as a CAS or talk about We. Wecellfs? I am a collector of theories of consciousness :) assuming your quote above is making reference to the "scale" at which "self" is understood, you might be interested in this theory: Information Closure Theory of Consciousness (2020) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342956066_Informati... This reddit comment sums it up better than the paper seem…

Thanks for sharing the interesting summary.

However I would like to mention that sometimes we do think so, as in "the will of the party", at least in some language's context.

Fun fact, when I tried to find similar sentence like "the will of Democratic/Republican Party", google returns 5 results for the former but followed by voters/members and thus not what I want, for the latter, there is no results at all. But as I find "the will of the party", I find an abstract of some paper from my area.

Maybe party is too small for this. It seems like "the will of the nation" is widely used.

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