Summations Only

Information and intelligence are 2 very different things and the idea that the former requires the latter is a pernicious assumption of ID arguments (see Gitt Information for a particularly blatant example).The sort of information you are talking about is in 2 places, one is in the stem cell populations which produce new cells and the other is in the environment in which the cell develops. The stem cell already has an accumulation of information in the form of epigenetic changes to its genome which reflect its developmental history. On top of this the daughter cell will develop its own individual developmental history as it progresses towards final differentiation and the environmental signals from surrounding cells/tissues will principally define that.TTFN,WK

The thing is that virtually all of those situations are in somatic cells and therefore almost completely irrelevant to evolution in terms of genome modification. In the same way that rearrangements in the genomes of cells in the immune system can be stimulated by outside challenges but are not passed on to successive generations in the germline.You might have a point in terms of single celled organisms, where light (specifically UV) can directly interact with the singular copy of the genome that will give rise to any successors. Once again we are returning to the same issue that all of the 'directed' mutational systems, weak as they are, are only apparently suitable for unicellular organisms and don't appear to have any plausible mechanism by which to operate in metazoa with a somatic/germline division.The problem as I see it is that you, and Shapiro as well to a large extent, are describing a real phenomenon but confusing the issue by trying to marry it to a word which already has a common and well understood usage which is not readily compatible with the usage you wish to ascribe to it. Your usage puts a very heavy and totally uncalled for teleological thrust into the discussion of cellular mechanisms.TTFN,WK

But the problem is that it is a gap within your explanation. In normal evolutionary theory there is no problem because we don't expect to see a direct, and certainly not a directed, feedback from the external environment to the germ cells. Which isn't to say that mutagenic environmental factors don't influence mutation rate and type in sperm cells, they do but not through any mediation by the nervous system.By insisting that such a mechanism exists you have created a gap and you have nothing to fill it with. You have created a problem that didn't previously exist in evolutionary theory for no good reason and apparently with no actual solution in mind.What you now seem to have done is change your claim entirely by effectively removing it from being a claim about genetics to being about less well defined forms of heritable traits passed on essentially through cultural transmission, since you seem to discount the idea that there can be genetically determined instinctual behaviours for some reason.As yet your theory seems to be entirely redundant, there is no need for it and it fails to do anything rather than pose a non-existent solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.TTFN,WK

At its heart biochemistry is a study of stochastic processes. This is not, as you put it, 'completely random' but neither is it deterministic, instead it is probabilistic.The rates at which interactions occur in a cell is governed by a huge diversity of factors and while one might ascribe to a fundamentally deterministic model philosophically there is no practical way to actually reliably predict the specific behaviour in any particular instance of an interaction. Instead our models of these interactions rely on the fact that cells tend to have substantial numbers of the interacting elements and we can measure the tendencies and average rates of these interactions to a degree. Biochemistry has done this to the point where we have remarkably reliable values for the physicochemistry of many molecular interactions in aggregate, and can even predict the behaviour of new molecules based on physicochemical similarity to known structures.In the same way the behaviours of the cells when they 'make a decision', to use the teleological language of Swain's paper, is governed by a wide array of variables and is highly dependant on the exact internal state of the cell when it receives a particular environmental stimulus. Small variation in that state can lead to drastically different 'decisions'.In development some studies have shown that differing cell fates in a population of cells is frequently determined by essentially random noise in the levels of expression of particular genes. For an interesting, though a bit abstract for my taste, discussion on stochasticity in development see Zernicka-Goetz and Huang (2010).TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Well I guess it is just hard for anyone else to tell, given how incoherent and vague your claims actually are, but your opening post made no mention at all of any of the things you are now bringing up about behaviour and instinct. You do indeed, endlessly and to no good effect. In this case verging on straight quote mining. The idea that there is a more updated form of the modern synthesis arising in no way gives credence to any of your empty word salads.TTFN,WK

Hi Shadow,I don't really see how you have gotten to this from your first paragraph. The fact that there is some direction in evolution is fairly non-controversial provided you accept the constraints of an organisms environment and its past evolutionary history as the directing factors. This is very different from planning however and I fail to see where you draw that conclusion from.The anticipation in Perkins and Swain's paper is in terms of a predicted future environment based on the current environment. There is no planning or forethought involved, rather the cell has a particular set of responses to a particular set of environmental triggers which tend to precede an environmental change. All this requires is for the population from which the cell comes to have been subjected to an environment in which such environmental changes have happened before for a long enough time for that environmental behaviour to affect the cell's evolution.As Swain and Parker themselves describe it ... And the behaviour can be 'unlearnt' ... They do not posit any intelligence planning the response, instead the stochastic cellular processes of the population are entrained by the environment and the process of natural selection to 'expect' certain conditions to follow certain other conditions and respond accordingly.The only way I can see this qualifying as any sort of intelligence is if you define the term simply to mean anything demonstrating an ability to respond to its environment.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Well Shadow71, who is who that reply was directed at, was. If you look at the post to which it was a reply, Message 263, you will see they say ... So you may well be in disagreement with Shadow on this but there is someone who is talking about planning. I agree, there are only 2 camps, those who adhere to some definition of intelligence as it is usually understood and you and Shadow (and Shapiro outside of this thread) who wish to redefine the term to such an extent as to make it into something completely unlike intelligence as it is usually understood and so broad as to encompass virtually anything.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

For a bit more background on this there is an open access article on these foxes by Trut et al. (2009).They conclude ... TTFN,WK