AservantofJEHOVAH:
"Is it compatible with trinitarian orthodoxy to claim that Jesus of Nazareth is the MOST High God?"
Sunday, 1 September 2024
Designed intelligence?
There Is No Known Evolutionary Rule for Animal Intelligence
Cambridge neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey argues that warm-bloodedness (endothermy) enables mammals and birds to be more sentient than, say, cold-blooded reptiles and fish. In an excerpt from his book, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press 2023), he argues that that development put these endotherms on the road to consciousness.
For one thing, as temperature goes up various bodily processes actually become more energetically efficient, so the costs can be partially offset. In particular, the cost of sending an impulse along a nerve decreases until it reaches a minimum at about 37 degrees Celsius. The result is that, although the overall running costs for the body go up with being warm-blooded, the costs for the brain are reduced. This means that mammals and birds can support larger and more complex brains with relatively little extra outlay of energy.
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY, “DID WARM-BLOODEDNESS PAVE THE PATH TO SENTIENCE?,” MIT PRESS, APRIL 15, 2024
He asks us to consider how warm-bloodedness might specifically affect the qualities we associate with intelligence:
It’s a well-established fact of physiology that the functional characteristics of neurons change with temperature. It’s been found for a range of animals — warm and cold-blooded — that the conduction speed for all classes of neurons increases by about 5 percent per degree Centigrade, while the refractory period decreases by roughly the same amount. This implies that when the ancestors of mammals and birds transitioned from a cold-blooded body temperature of, say, 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) to a warm-blooded temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, the speed of their brain circuits would have more than doubled.
We’ve remarked already on the “lucky accidents” that have, at several points, played a part in the evolution of sensations. If warm-bloodedness played these key roles, first in changing the way animals thought about the autonomy of the self, second in preparing the brain for phenomenal consciousness, here was an accident as lucky as they come.
HUMPHREY, “PATH TO SENTIENCE?”
But the Situation Is Not Clear-Cut
When researchers have tested reptiles, using the same tests used on birds, the results have been surprising:
The lizards’ success on a worm-based test normally used on birds was “completely unexpected,” said Duke biologist Manuel Leal, who led the study.
He tested the lizards using a wooden block with two wells, one that was empty and one that held a worm but was covered by a cap. Four lizards, two male and two female, passed the test by either biting the cap or bumping it out of the way.
The lizards solved the problem in three fewer attempts than birds need to flip the correct cap and pass the test, Leal said. Birds usually get up to six chances a day, but lizards only get one chance per day because they eat less. In other words, if a lizard makes a mistake, it has to remember how to correct it until the next day, Leal said. He and Duke graduate student Brian Powell describe the experiment and results online in Biology Letters.
ASHLEY YEAGER, “BRAINY LIZARDS PASS TESTS FOR BIRDS,” DUKE TODAY, JULY 12, 2011
Significantly, the lizards had to learn a new task. They don’t feed themselves in the wild by flipping caps. And when the researchers raised the bar by switching which well held the worm, two of the lizards figured it out. As a result, the researchers named them Plato and Socrates.
That’s hardly the only instance of reptile intelligence observed by researchers. For example, the New York Times interviewed comparative psychologist Gordon M. Burghardt on monitor lizards:
Other studies have documented similar levels of flexibility and problem solving. Dr. Burghardt, for instance, presented monitor lizards with an utterly unfamiliar apparatus, a clear plastic tube with two hinged doors and several live mice inside. The lizards rapidly figured out how to rotate the tube and open the doors to capture the prey. “It really amazed us that they all solved the problem very quickly and then did much better the second time,” Dr. Burghardt said. “That’s a sign of real learning.”
EMILY ANTHES, “COLDBLOODED DOES NOT MEAN STUPID,” NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 19, 2013
Training a reptile.
Anoles and monitor lizards are considered to be among the most intelligent lizards. But it hasn’t been customary until recently to credit any lizards with much intelligence. That may be due to mishandling in some cases. Anthes notes at the Times that tests for reptile intelligence should take into account normal differences between, say, mammal behavior and reptile behavior: “By using experiments originally designed for mammals, researchers may have been setting reptiles up for failure. For instance, scientists commonly use “aversive stimuli,” such as loud sounds and bright lights, to shape rodent behavior. But reptiles respond to many of these stimuli by freezing, thereby not performing.”
Warm-bloodedness enables the mammal and the bird to be active for much longer than the reptile and to be active in colder temperatures. Thus, mammals and birds likely encounter more situations where they can (and must) demonstrate sentience and intelligence. But warm-bloodedness does not seem to be an essential component of those qualities.
Animal Intelligence Remains Something of a Mystery
One thinks of the invertebrate octopus and the brainless crab, which pass animal intelligence tests while breaking all the rules about which life forms are supposed to be smart. If there is a fixed evolutionary rule about which types of animals are intelligent, it has not been discovered yet.
Molecular biology is only the complex beginning of Darwinism's explanatory deficits?
The Extracellular Space: Where the Rest of Life Takes Place
When it comes to the discussion of how life came into being, whether by intelligent design or by the unguided processes proposed by evolutionary biology, I have a pet peeve.
It’s that almost all of the discussion from both camps revolves around just molecular and cellular biology — DNA, RNA, genes and their regulatory networks (GRNs), proteins and their various shapes, sizes, and functions, the cell membrane and cytoskeleton, and all the other fascinating intricacies of the cell.
Don’t Get Me Wrong
When it comes to the dialogue about the causal hurdles that life must overcome, every component mentioned above is important. And to my mind, they all favor ID.
After all, as chemist James Tour wrote in his chapter in The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy, when considering what is known about the laws of chemistry, “we’re still clueless about the origin of life.” Biologist Douglas Axe, in his book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, tells us that “of the possible genes encoding protein chains 153 amino acids in length, only about one in a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion is expected to encode a chain that folds well enough to perform a biological function.”
Zooming Out
But what about multicellular organisms, like us? Isn’t there more to think about and explain than just molecular and cellular biology? Here’s how Steve Laufmann and I posed the problem in our book Your Designed Body.
Zooming out from a single cell, the human body as a whole is made up of around thirty trillion cells. It needs to solve all the same kinds of problems that a cell does, plus quite a few more. And it needs new ways to solve old problems, ways completely different from how the same problems were solved at the cellular level.
For example, a single-celled organism is like a microscopic island of life. The cell gets what it needs and gets rid of what it doesn’t need from its surrounding environment. In contrast, a large multi-cellular organism (like you) is more like a continent with a deep and dark interior. Most of the cells reside deep in the interior with no direct access to the body’s surrounding environment. For a multi-cellular organism, then, harvesting the raw materials its cells need and getting rid of toxic byproducts becomes a major logistical problem.
Several hundred such problems must be solved for a complex body to be alive. And many of the solutions to these basic problems generate new problems that must also be solved, or that constrain other solutions in critical ways. The result is that for a complex body to be alive, thousands of deeply interconnected problems must be solved, and many of them solved at all times, or life will fail.
The bottom line is that, as hard as it is for a cell to maintain life, it’s much harder for an organism with a complex body plan like yours.
Besides knowing what’s going on inside our cells (within the intracellular space), don’t we also need to consider what’s going on outside our cells (but within our body) — in the extracellular space? Where one-third of our body’s total water resides? Where the various biomolecules that provide the framework for structure and support to all the different tissues in our body are located? Where the precise chemistry allowing for tissue survival and proper nerve and muscle function must be present? And much, much more.
My Experience as a Physician
As a hospice physician, I can tell you that all this is a matter of “life and death.” It’s something that evolutionary biologists rarely mention. This may be, at best, because they’ve never considered or understood it, or at worst, because they can’t explain it and it undermines their theory.
Let me give you a practical example from what I see and do every day. That way, you can understand why adding what goes on inside the extracellular space as a causal hurdle for multicelluar life is important. Meet my patient Joe.
Joe had had several heart attacks and now his heart wasn’t pumping as well as it should. In fact, it was doing so at one-quarter its normal strength — meaning he had heart failure. Since his heart wasn’t pumping efficiently, it caused a reduction in the force of arterial blood flow which turned on certain hormone systems in his body. These systems were designed (yes — designed) to try to correct such a situation. Unfortunately, this caused Joe’s body to start holding on to excessive amounts of water.
Joe’s body’s inability to control how much water was in his extracellular space put him at risk of death. Fluid was taking up more and more space in his lungs, making it harder and harder to breathe. Since he kept going in and out of the hospital and his physicians could not solve his recurrent fluid overload problem, he was put on hospice. By the time I first saw him, Joe could barely move or even talk without becoming short of breath. Fortunately for Joe, I knew exactly what medication adjustments were needed to safely remove his excessive fluid. Within a few months, we were able to discharge him alive from our service.
The above case (and I’ve had dozens of them) clearly shows that what’s going on in the extracellular space matters. It matters so much that to not even talk about it, in the context of biological origins, is frankly unscientific.
It also shows that my pet peeve about the absence of this discussion in the origins debate is my own fault. So, please watch this space for articles in the future on the extracellular space and ID.
Our self-styled betters in their own words.
Whatever you think about think about JEHOVAH'S Witnesses We (unlike our self-styled betters) can guarantee you that it will never be our politicians, magistrates,police trampling your rights,
Ps. We know that the religious left also have their version of the police state .
Pope francis the universalist?
Franciscan media
...Fazio asked Pope Francis how he imagines God. “Like a generous father,” the pope responded, citing the prodigal son parable (Lk 15:11–32). Pope Francis said that he believes “in a God who is not scandalized by our sins because he is a father and accompanies us.” The pope asked: “Does God accompany sinners or immediately condemn them to hell? No, he chooses to accompany us. . . . So it’s hard to even imagine hell, a father who condemns someone for all eternity.” The pope said he hopes that hell is empty.
In fact, we cannot believe in hell in the same way that we believe in the God described in the Bible. The former is a possibility while the latter is a fact...
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