Re: other causes besides genes, see also Michael Levin's research on how electric fields direct the development of organisms, which Mark Bisone discusses here (video linked at top of article highly recommended): https://markbisone.substack.com/p/what-reaches-back
It's been clear for a long time that there are many apparently interacting causes beyond genetic mutations. I'm increasingly convinced that genes aren't even the primary or controlling cause. They might just be a bit of "software" deployed as required to produce raw materials. Not because I am a biologist, just because I've listened to them argue and poke holes and slowly admit the discovery of things that don't fit into this just-so picture of little nanomachines reading protein punch cards. There's a real sense that there's much more going on and they haven't got much of a clue of the scale, let alone the shape, of it.
The idea of organismal development from zygote to adult as a sort of "computer program" that is carried out is fundamentally flawed, as I think an insurmountable mountain of observations (including those of Levin) now makes undeniable that this process is irreducibly purposeful and transcends anything mechanistic and computable.
HOWEVER, if we nevertheless think of organismal development as analogous to a sort of computer program being carried out, then DNA is not analogous to the computer program itself. Rather, DNA, I think, is analogous to a configuration file that the program reads various settings from as it initializes and runs.
I'm thinking of evolution in reverse, devolution as it were.
All living things created "perfectly". What does perfectly mean? Able to reproduce and also change to inhabit all environments. But, thinking backwards, change would come not by gaining information through mutation, but rather by losing information already present.
Initial organisms of the various kinds having every shred of genetics possible to that kind, all functioning, all available to pass to offspring. Something like the Cambrian explosion would be the result. A few original fish kinds give birth to all the fish species seen by losing info, basically "choosing" to express certain info and not other. Once a prototype shark is born it can only produce other forms of sharks. It has lost the information necessary to produce anything else. "Primitive" sharks would only seem so because they have not yet lost the information that specializes the remaining info to the environment they inhabit.
An analogy. Two men are washed ashore on opposite sides of a deserted island. One man has nothing but the tattered clothes on his back, the other has strapped to his back several tools and supplies useful for the environment he finds himself in. Which has a better chance of survival? Now imagine two men washed ashore both with a tool kit and supplies, some very particularly necessary and most not. One man is able to abandon the unnecessary items carrying only those that are essential for survival in this environment, while the other is forced to carry every single item everywhere he goes. Now who survives? The ability to lose information would be very helpful towards survival. But the loss of too much info so as to be able to fit into small, niche environments would result in extinction.
Just a thought, at least as plausible as Darwin's. 😁
There is some good evidence that this the reality.
In the presence of penicillin, some few bacteria will survive because they have certain rare properties that prevent the drug from killing them. Their neighbours being deceased they come to dominate the population.
Neodarwinists like to claim this as proof of evolution.
But, there's an empirical fly this philosophical ointment: experiments mixing the original strain with the new strain absent the penicillin have shown the older strains to be more fit, as in out-reproducing their resistant offspring.
Darwinism was a pre-scientific theory (at the time, there was no knowledge of DNA or even Mendelian inheritance) specifically created to rationalize atheism. Darwin was a frustrated atheist before his voyage on The Beagle, well aware that the existence of complex creatures proved the existence of a Creator to most people. Darwinism has always been used to discredit that belief.
Worse, Darwin was an angry theist. Specifically, angry at the very God he denied. The irrationality is plain, but many people forget that the extreme emotions stimulate adrenalin which shuts down the higher cognitive functions.
He was angry because of monogamy. Darwin said, waving his fist at the sky "why a non-existent old guy in the sky says that I cannot have five or six cousins as wives? Who does he think he is to hamper my progress?"
Probably because it sits at the boundary of material and mental (not to say spiritual), biology is particularly prone to the great Sin of Reification. Darwinism, genetics and the worst by far is consciousness.
Imagine you are walking on the beach and you find an arrangement of shells that spells out a java code for a new iPhone app.
neo-Darwinism proposes that the code itself calls not merely the app but the iPhone itself into existence.
Talking about a metaphor not being able to stand on its own feet. A friend once observed that she's never seen anyone remark on the most remarkable aspect of Nebuchadnezzar's dream statue: it's got feet of clay and yet it's STANDING!
Ironically, Nebuchadnezzar understood this fatal flaw in his own hubris: the golden statue he builds is all of gold, even the feet.
Genes come from the arrangement of molecules, which fold up into proteins after they are assembled in the cells by nucleic acids. These acids form base pairs, like guanodine with erodine, and synthetic urodine with flavoribbons. This is called gene expression, when the enzyme combines with the exosome to inhibit the colasterate from synthezising B4 inhibitance. The urizine preclase template is then formed around the lipid sac base, with arranges in with the nucleasis toxizine. This process is repeated thousands of times until it gets it right, which rarely happens. Then you get a random mutation.
I have not yet read Denis Noble's book, but I've seen some of his work that's available online and watched some interesting interviews with him. I've also read some of the work by Michael Levin, Stuart Kauffman, Perry Marshall, Sy Garte, and others. I also recommend "Plato's Revenge" about the work Richard Sternberg is doing, "Beyond Evolution" by Sy Garte, and "Why Is a Fly Not a Horse?" by Giuseppe Sermonti (written way back in 2005 but way ahead of the curve in identifying things these other guys are now talking about).
What the work of all of these men demonstrates is, as you say, that living organisms are substances in the Aristotelean/Platonic sense, that they have irreducibly teleological ends and essences.
In particular, what they all demonstrate, via many different examples, many different routes, and many different observations at many different levels, is that multicellular organisms do not follow any sort of computable program or algorithm as they develop from zygote to adult. Rather, they have a predetermined abstract goal (or purpose/pattern/telos/essence/species/form) that they are seeking to fulfill, and the ways in which they will get there, routing around novel challenges as necessary in novel ways on the fly, is far beyond anything that could possibly be encoded in any predetermined algorithm (particularly not one "written" by blind mechanistic processes) that could be run in any sort of physically realizable computer or stored in any finite physical medium (such as DNA).
And while the development of organisms transcends anything that is computable or deterministic, it is very clearly not random either, because the forms towards which organisms develop are defined by complex, integrated function that is often analogous to human technology but beyond it in sophistication by many orders of magnitude, and that couldn't possibly work were it arrived at haphazardly.
To my mind, the implications of these men's findings are quite a bit more far-reaching than most of them realize, or at least are willing to say in public, whether that be because it would invite more pressure than they already face, or because of residual Darwinian assumptions they still have, or because the philosophical implications might be too theistic for some of them. And I think these implications can be *deduced*, not merely inferred.
First, they have implications far beyond biology. The fact that organisms exhibit goal-directed causal powers that are irreducible to the aggregate mechanistic behavior of the components that make them up demonstrates both that purpose is a fundamental form of causation that does not reduce to chance or necessity, and second that irreducible wholes with irreducible causal powers (aka substances) exist not just at the subatomic level (eg entanglement) but at the macro level of organisms. It certainly means for one thing that our universe cannot possibly be a computer simulation, as it contains causation that is non-mechanistic and thus not reducible in principle to a computer algorithm.
Second, most of these men will argue that natural selection is not the whole story, and that it needs to be supplemented. This, I think, vastly understates the situation. Natural selection is an incoherent concept, and it thus is not ANY part of the story. The reason neo-Darwinism is more incoherent than Darwin himself is that it is more entirely dependent upon "natural selection" as an explanation than Darwin, who was internally conflicted about his theory and made concessions to others. But "natural selection" has always been a self-contradictory philosophical contrivance for trying to reduce purpose to blind mechanism and not a real mechanism in and of itself, and it has served only to confuse, confound, and invite sloppy thinking in the century and a half since Darwin dreamt it up. The reality of irreducible purpose and biological substances was ALWAYS knowable by reason, but Darwin obscured it and sent the world down a reductionist, nominalist dead end. Now that a growing mountain of direct observations are making it impossible even for informed moderns to deny their reality, it's time to simply drop "natural selection" from our picture of the world and reconceive biology in teleological terms that reflect reality.
Another common theme among "3rd way" evolutionists is the search for "alternative mechanisms" to natural selection that will help explain the development and form of living organisms. As your review indicates, Noble does this. But there are a couple fundamental problems here. The first is that we don't actually have any mechanisms of evolution to begin with, since natural selection isn't really a physical mechanism. But more fundamentally, since the development of organisms towards their forms is irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic, *it also cannot possibly be explained by any possible mechanism*. It's the very premise that scientific inquiry means reduction to mechanism that is being overturned here.
Also, since the substantial forms towards which organisms develop are not reducible to or encoded in anything physical, and are arrived at via irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic causes, it follows that the origins of *new* substantial forms (that is, changes from one species to another or the origin of de novo biological function) must *also* be brought about by something irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic.
Indeed, since this is a general feature of multicellular organisms, the origin of multicellularity itself must have been irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic. No explanation according to which cells "just happen" to start working together by happenstance can possibly account for it, and examples of single-celled organisms working in tandem in ways that lack don't involve a single starting cell non-mechanistally building towards a substantial form or goal (such as the case of algae) cannot possibly have any logical relevance to the origin of multicellular organisms.
And while all of this is especially obvious in multicellular organisms, it's increasingly clear that single-celled organisms are also irreducibly purposeful and not reducible to machines. Note that not only can we not build a living cell given all the components of one, but we don't know how to make a living cell out of one that has just died, even though all the parts are already in the right place. We don't know what was lost and can't define it in physical or mechanistic terms. Much is made by intelligent design proponents of the extreme improbability of all the parts necessary for the simplest possible life coming into existence and being arranged in just the right way by chance, and this is indeed something very worth pointing out. But deeper issue is that even if when we DO have all the parts in the right place, that by itself is not sufficient for life. What is the probability that if we were to somehow get all the parts set up right, that they would spontaneously come to life? I submit that the probability is zero, because it would require the spontaneous metaphysical jump from nonliving accidental arrangements to an irreducible living substance, which is something we are not capable of achieving by physical means.
Finally, where I think that Noble and others are wrong is in their belief that the irreducibly purposeful essences they are discovering in biology do not "let God back in." Indeed they do. The fact is, living organisms have not always existed. Each species - each biological essence or substantial form - came into existence at some point in time, as did life as a whole. Yet they exhibit causal powers that are irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic. Since this purposeful causation does not reduce to mechanistic causation, the Principle Of Sufficient Reason tells us that what caused them to come into existence must be irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic. Indeed, since the universe contains such causation and since it does not reduce to mechanism, the PSR tells us that the universe itself must derive from an ultimate reality, and that that ultimate reality must have purposeful, non-mechanistic causal powers. In particular, that ultimate reality must possess the power of reason, since reason is one of the irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic powers of biological organisms, namely human beings. But to say that the ultimate reality is purposeful and possesses reason, and that this is behind the origins of living species, is just to say that the ultimate reality is God and that He created us.
What constitutes an "organism"? Not "what is [a/the] definition of an organism", but objectively? An entity [the overriding requirement] which is objectively subject to selection processes and which subjectively has preferences.
There are multiple levels of organism: single-cell, with cell nuclei, multicellular, colonies and collectives, differentiated organs ... organisms overlap, cells, tissue types, organs, organisms, populations ... ecosystems, Gaia ... why not stars, solar systems, clusters, arms, galaxies, galactic clusters ... the Universe. Or various levels of demons, spirits, angels, gods and God?
There is something we're deliberately obtuse about in the relationships among thermodynamics, information, "randomness", knowledge, knowability, objectivity, subjectivity, consciousness, telos, will, necessity, possibility, a link in the great chain of being denying the reality of all the other links which make ours possible. [N-dimensional chain-mail tree of being, really.]
Replace time with +/- imaginary "helical" time and you go from the wave equation to heat diffusion equation and back. Heat is just entropy which is information and 3-way vice-versa, so everything which happens is encoded as increase of heat/information entropy, so basis for general theory of woo, afterlife possible and Akashic records certain:
Genes that exist have, in the past, survived, most likely over many thousands of generations (mutations are rare), and the more numerous they are, the more successful they have been at replicating over the generations. This creates a massive bias in genes towards striving to maximise their survival and replication through their phenotypic effects. It is as though genes have been designed to survive and propagate, and this is the sense in which genes may be considered 'selfish'.
Individual organisms have evolved so that each is motivated to maximise its inclusive fitness.
With you until the last sentence. Some species/genera have NOT evolved. Conifers are 300 million years old. So are "modern" corals. Have they been unmotivated this whole time? Assigning "will power" to turnips is a stretch. Whatever the original life forms were, it's clear they didn't arise by accident or "will" in the primordial goo. Why would subsequent forms arise by accident or desire? Did Intelligent Design get turned off at some point in the distant past? Have you ever noticed how God deniers can't explain much of anything?
Truly intelligent life would be able to evaluate its own fitness for survival, and finding it wanting, would gladly offer itself up to predators. Hot looking women get all the sex they want no matter how stupid they are. It´s not fair, but it works. Science.
"This is fundamental, because one of the classic objections to “evolution” was the truth that effects cannot be greater than their cause. How can animals of species A produce an animal of species B, when B is not the same in essence of A? That difference is what makes them different species."
Species are actually human constructs, A and B are not different "in essense" (what does that really mean in this context? I'm not sure). Animals of species A start mutating and at some time they cannot procreate with A anymore, and are different than A in various aspects so we call them B, but those are human categories, they are not something intrinsic. Dogs of different races can look and act very different, but we categorize them in the same species (I guess because they still can procreate between each other).
"All these cells in our body have almost exactly the same DNA in their genomes! That should already warn you that it cannot be the DNA alone that determines what happens in cells, tissues, and organs. The same genome can be interpreted in completely different ways”. ??
What's in human DNA, the same DNA that is identical in every cell, can and does entirely determine how cells are controlled, how DNA expression occurs and what happens in tissues and organs.
So a group of cells become specialised during the growth of a multicell organism and start producing various biochemicals in response to the presence of other biochemicals in an organised fashion, that's all down to DNA, the same DNA regardless of where any particular DNA of any particular cell is in any part of that particular multicell organism.
Re: other causes besides genes, see also Michael Levin's research on how electric fields direct the development of organisms, which Mark Bisone discusses here (video linked at top of article highly recommended): https://markbisone.substack.com/p/what-reaches-back
It's been clear for a long time that there are many apparently interacting causes beyond genetic mutations. I'm increasingly convinced that genes aren't even the primary or controlling cause. They might just be a bit of "software" deployed as required to produce raw materials. Not because I am a biologist, just because I've listened to them argue and poke holes and slowly admit the discovery of things that don't fit into this just-so picture of little nanomachines reading protein punch cards. There's a real sense that there's much more going on and they haven't got much of a clue of the scale, let alone the shape, of it.
The idea of organismal development from zygote to adult as a sort of "computer program" that is carried out is fundamentally flawed, as I think an insurmountable mountain of observations (including those of Levin) now makes undeniable that this process is irreducibly purposeful and transcends anything mechanistic and computable.
HOWEVER, if we nevertheless think of organismal development as analogous to a sort of computer program being carried out, then DNA is not analogous to the computer program itself. Rather, DNA, I think, is analogous to a configuration file that the program reads various settings from as it initializes and runs.
I'm thinking of evolution in reverse, devolution as it were.
All living things created "perfectly". What does perfectly mean? Able to reproduce and also change to inhabit all environments. But, thinking backwards, change would come not by gaining information through mutation, but rather by losing information already present.
Initial organisms of the various kinds having every shred of genetics possible to that kind, all functioning, all available to pass to offspring. Something like the Cambrian explosion would be the result. A few original fish kinds give birth to all the fish species seen by losing info, basically "choosing" to express certain info and not other. Once a prototype shark is born it can only produce other forms of sharks. It has lost the information necessary to produce anything else. "Primitive" sharks would only seem so because they have not yet lost the information that specializes the remaining info to the environment they inhabit.
An analogy. Two men are washed ashore on opposite sides of a deserted island. One man has nothing but the tattered clothes on his back, the other has strapped to his back several tools and supplies useful for the environment he finds himself in. Which has a better chance of survival? Now imagine two men washed ashore both with a tool kit and supplies, some very particularly necessary and most not. One man is able to abandon the unnecessary items carrying only those that are essential for survival in this environment, while the other is forced to carry every single item everywhere he goes. Now who survives? The ability to lose information would be very helpful towards survival. But the loss of too much info so as to be able to fit into small, niche environments would result in extinction.
Just a thought, at least as plausible as Darwin's. 😁
There is some good evidence that this the reality.
In the presence of penicillin, some few bacteria will survive because they have certain rare properties that prevent the drug from killing them. Their neighbours being deceased they come to dominate the population.
Neodarwinists like to claim this as proof of evolution.
But, there's an empirical fly this philosophical ointment: experiments mixing the original strain with the new strain absent the penicillin have shown the older strains to be more fit, as in out-reproducing their resistant offspring.
So, the much dreaded 'antibiotic resistance' trope may be yet another lie of medicine and politics. Good!
Now let's debunk the myth of drug addiction, and addiction in general, and the mythical link between addiction and genetics.
Careful, some people can get very angry when they run out of excuses.
Darwinism was a pre-scientific theory (at the time, there was no knowledge of DNA or even Mendelian inheritance) specifically created to rationalize atheism. Darwin was a frustrated atheist before his voyage on The Beagle, well aware that the existence of complex creatures proved the existence of a Creator to most people. Darwinism has always been used to discredit that belief.
Worse, Darwin was an angry theist. Specifically, angry at the very God he denied. The irrationality is plain, but many people forget that the extreme emotions stimulate adrenalin which shuts down the higher cognitive functions.
He was angry because of monogamy. Darwin said, waving his fist at the sky "why a non-existent old guy in the sky says that I cannot have five or six cousins as wives? Who does he think he is to hamper my progress?"
Probably because it sits at the boundary of material and mental (not to say spiritual), biology is particularly prone to the great Sin of Reification. Darwinism, genetics and the worst by far is consciousness.
Here's a long video. You may be interested in what the guy says.
https://rumble.com/v731ytk-world-leading-scientist-on-the-evolution-myth-super-humans-genetic-engineer.html
Look below for links to 'chapters' in the interview.
Life as code:
Imagine you are walking on the beach and you find an arrangement of shells that spells out a java code for a new iPhone app.
neo-Darwinism proposes that the code itself calls not merely the app but the iPhone itself into existence.
Talking about a metaphor not being able to stand on its own feet. A friend once observed that she's never seen anyone remark on the most remarkable aspect of Nebuchadnezzar's dream statue: it's got feet of clay and yet it's STANDING!
Ironically, Nebuchadnezzar understood this fatal flaw in his own hubris: the golden statue he builds is all of gold, even the feet.
An alternative title for your Substack... “Random” is with respect to knowledge, not things.
Good idea.
A lot of what we presume to be knowledge is really ignorance in drag.
We put labels on things we don't understand and thus we assert mastery over them.
Take gravity, for instance, a phenomenon we can describe reasonably well but can in no wise explain.
Oh yes we have theories, another bluff word that means "I don't know but this seems to me to be a reasonable guess".
Still doesn’t explain where genes came from. And likely never will.
Keep going down the chain, you’ll get to my point eventually.
Genes come from the arrangement of molecules, which fold up into proteins after they are assembled in the cells by nucleic acids. These acids form base pairs, like guanodine with erodine, and synthetic urodine with flavoribbons. This is called gene expression, when the enzyme combines with the exosome to inhibit the colasterate from synthezising B4 inhibitance. The urizine preclase template is then formed around the lipid sac base, with arranges in with the nucleasis toxizine. This process is repeated thousands of times until it gets it right, which rarely happens. Then you get a random mutation.
Great read Bill! One of your best imho, thanks.
Many thanks.
I have not yet read Denis Noble's book, but I've seen some of his work that's available online and watched some interesting interviews with him. I've also read some of the work by Michael Levin, Stuart Kauffman, Perry Marshall, Sy Garte, and others. I also recommend "Plato's Revenge" about the work Richard Sternberg is doing, "Beyond Evolution" by Sy Garte, and "Why Is a Fly Not a Horse?" by Giuseppe Sermonti (written way back in 2005 but way ahead of the curve in identifying things these other guys are now talking about).
What the work of all of these men demonstrates is, as you say, that living organisms are substances in the Aristotelean/Platonic sense, that they have irreducibly teleological ends and essences.
In particular, what they all demonstrate, via many different examples, many different routes, and many different observations at many different levels, is that multicellular organisms do not follow any sort of computable program or algorithm as they develop from zygote to adult. Rather, they have a predetermined abstract goal (or purpose/pattern/telos/essence/species/form) that they are seeking to fulfill, and the ways in which they will get there, routing around novel challenges as necessary in novel ways on the fly, is far beyond anything that could possibly be encoded in any predetermined algorithm (particularly not one "written" by blind mechanistic processes) that could be run in any sort of physically realizable computer or stored in any finite physical medium (such as DNA).
And while the development of organisms transcends anything that is computable or deterministic, it is very clearly not random either, because the forms towards which organisms develop are defined by complex, integrated function that is often analogous to human technology but beyond it in sophistication by many orders of magnitude, and that couldn't possibly work were it arrived at haphazardly.
To my mind, the implications of these men's findings are quite a bit more far-reaching than most of them realize, or at least are willing to say in public, whether that be because it would invite more pressure than they already face, or because of residual Darwinian assumptions they still have, or because the philosophical implications might be too theistic for some of them. And I think these implications can be *deduced*, not merely inferred.
First, they have implications far beyond biology. The fact that organisms exhibit goal-directed causal powers that are irreducible to the aggregate mechanistic behavior of the components that make them up demonstrates both that purpose is a fundamental form of causation that does not reduce to chance or necessity, and second that irreducible wholes with irreducible causal powers (aka substances) exist not just at the subatomic level (eg entanglement) but at the macro level of organisms. It certainly means for one thing that our universe cannot possibly be a computer simulation, as it contains causation that is non-mechanistic and thus not reducible in principle to a computer algorithm.
Second, most of these men will argue that natural selection is not the whole story, and that it needs to be supplemented. This, I think, vastly understates the situation. Natural selection is an incoherent concept, and it thus is not ANY part of the story. The reason neo-Darwinism is more incoherent than Darwin himself is that it is more entirely dependent upon "natural selection" as an explanation than Darwin, who was internally conflicted about his theory and made concessions to others. But "natural selection" has always been a self-contradictory philosophical contrivance for trying to reduce purpose to blind mechanism and not a real mechanism in and of itself, and it has served only to confuse, confound, and invite sloppy thinking in the century and a half since Darwin dreamt it up. The reality of irreducible purpose and biological substances was ALWAYS knowable by reason, but Darwin obscured it and sent the world down a reductionist, nominalist dead end. Now that a growing mountain of direct observations are making it impossible even for informed moderns to deny their reality, it's time to simply drop "natural selection" from our picture of the world and reconceive biology in teleological terms that reflect reality.
Another common theme among "3rd way" evolutionists is the search for "alternative mechanisms" to natural selection that will help explain the development and form of living organisms. As your review indicates, Noble does this. But there are a couple fundamental problems here. The first is that we don't actually have any mechanisms of evolution to begin with, since natural selection isn't really a physical mechanism. But more fundamentally, since the development of organisms towards their forms is irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic, *it also cannot possibly be explained by any possible mechanism*. It's the very premise that scientific inquiry means reduction to mechanism that is being overturned here.
Also, since the substantial forms towards which organisms develop are not reducible to or encoded in anything physical, and are arrived at via irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic causes, it follows that the origins of *new* substantial forms (that is, changes from one species to another or the origin of de novo biological function) must *also* be brought about by something irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic.
Indeed, since this is a general feature of multicellular organisms, the origin of multicellularity itself must have been irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic. No explanation according to which cells "just happen" to start working together by happenstance can possibly account for it, and examples of single-celled organisms working in tandem in ways that lack don't involve a single starting cell non-mechanistally building towards a substantial form or goal (such as the case of algae) cannot possibly have any logical relevance to the origin of multicellular organisms.
And while all of this is especially obvious in multicellular organisms, it's increasingly clear that single-celled organisms are also irreducibly purposeful and not reducible to machines. Note that not only can we not build a living cell given all the components of one, but we don't know how to make a living cell out of one that has just died, even though all the parts are already in the right place. We don't know what was lost and can't define it in physical or mechanistic terms. Much is made by intelligent design proponents of the extreme improbability of all the parts necessary for the simplest possible life coming into existence and being arranged in just the right way by chance, and this is indeed something very worth pointing out. But deeper issue is that even if when we DO have all the parts in the right place, that by itself is not sufficient for life. What is the probability that if we were to somehow get all the parts set up right, that they would spontaneously come to life? I submit that the probability is zero, because it would require the spontaneous metaphysical jump from nonliving accidental arrangements to an irreducible living substance, which is something we are not capable of achieving by physical means.
Finally, where I think that Noble and others are wrong is in their belief that the irreducibly purposeful essences they are discovering in biology do not "let God back in." Indeed they do. The fact is, living organisms have not always existed. Each species - each biological essence or substantial form - came into existence at some point in time, as did life as a whole. Yet they exhibit causal powers that are irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic. Since this purposeful causation does not reduce to mechanistic causation, the Principle Of Sufficient Reason tells us that what caused them to come into existence must be irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic. Indeed, since the universe contains such causation and since it does not reduce to mechanism, the PSR tells us that the universe itself must derive from an ultimate reality, and that that ultimate reality must have purposeful, non-mechanistic causal powers. In particular, that ultimate reality must possess the power of reason, since reason is one of the irreducibly purposeful and non-mechanistic powers of biological organisms, namely human beings. But to say that the ultimate reality is purposeful and possesses reason, and that this is behind the origins of living species, is just to say that the ultimate reality is God and that He created us.
What constitutes an "organism"? Not "what is [a/the] definition of an organism", but objectively? An entity [the overriding requirement] which is objectively subject to selection processes and which subjectively has preferences.
There are multiple levels of organism: single-cell, with cell nuclei, multicellular, colonies and collectives, differentiated organs ... organisms overlap, cells, tissue types, organs, organisms, populations ... ecosystems, Gaia ... why not stars, solar systems, clusters, arms, galaxies, galactic clusters ... the Universe. Or various levels of demons, spirits, angels, gods and God?
There is something we're deliberately obtuse about in the relationships among thermodynamics, information, "randomness", knowledge, knowability, objectivity, subjectivity, consciousness, telos, will, necessity, possibility, a link in the great chain of being denying the reality of all the other links which make ours possible. [N-dimensional chain-mail tree of being, really.]
Replace time with +/- imaginary "helical" time and you go from the wave equation to heat diffusion equation and back. Heat is just entropy which is information and 3-way vice-versa, so everything which happens is encoded as increase of heat/information entropy, so basis for general theory of woo, afterlife possible and Akashic records certain:
https://substack.com/@enonh/p-163971007
Genes that exist have, in the past, survived, most likely over many thousands of generations (mutations are rare), and the more numerous they are, the more successful they have been at replicating over the generations. This creates a massive bias in genes towards striving to maximise their survival and replication through their phenotypic effects. It is as though genes have been designed to survive and propagate, and this is the sense in which genes may be considered 'selfish'.
Individual organisms have evolved so that each is motivated to maximise its inclusive fitness.
With you until the last sentence. Some species/genera have NOT evolved. Conifers are 300 million years old. So are "modern" corals. Have they been unmotivated this whole time? Assigning "will power" to turnips is a stretch. Whatever the original life forms were, it's clear they didn't arise by accident or "will" in the primordial goo. Why would subsequent forms arise by accident or desire? Did Intelligent Design get turned off at some point in the distant past? Have you ever noticed how God deniers can't explain much of anything?
Can we reintroduce soul at this point?
We have. The soul is the essence or form.
We do not have souls: we are souls.
Truly intelligent life would be able to evaluate its own fitness for survival, and finding it wanting, would gladly offer itself up to predators. Hot looking women get all the sex they want no matter how stupid they are. It´s not fair, but it works. Science.
"This is fundamental, because one of the classic objections to “evolution” was the truth that effects cannot be greater than their cause. How can animals of species A produce an animal of species B, when B is not the same in essence of A? That difference is what makes them different species."
Species are actually human constructs, A and B are not different "in essense" (what does that really mean in this context? I'm not sure). Animals of species A start mutating and at some time they cannot procreate with A anymore, and are different than A in various aspects so we call them B, but those are human categories, they are not something intrinsic. Dogs of different races can look and act very different, but we categorize them in the same species (I guess because they still can procreate between each other).
"All these cells in our body have almost exactly the same DNA in their genomes! That should already warn you that it cannot be the DNA alone that determines what happens in cells, tissues, and organs. The same genome can be interpreted in completely different ways”. ??
What's in human DNA, the same DNA that is identical in every cell, can and does entirely determine how cells are controlled, how DNA expression occurs and what happens in tissues and organs.
"Epigenetics"
So a group of cells become specialised during the growth of a multicell organism and start producing various biochemicals in response to the presence of other biochemicals in an organised fashion, that's all down to DNA, the same DNA regardless of where any particular DNA of any particular cell is in any part of that particular multicell organism.