Replies

"Consider a stream. Water does an excellent job of finding an efficient path downhill, dealing with obstacles and changes to the surrounding landscape as it goes. And yet there is no engineer making the decisions--heck, a stream's not even alive! Think about how much more a living system can do. Look at how different areas of the brain can take over the functions of areas damaged by a stroke or injury. And yet there's no engineer in there making decisions about where to reroute the signals--the system makes those decisions itself."

Water does not make decisions, it does not find anything, it simply responds to outside forces.

The difference between water and living things is that living things have DNA, water does not.

To say that because water does something[that in fact it does not], is proof that living cells containing DNA do something similar for the same reason, is a logical fallacy.

The brains ability to re-route signals from damaged paths to unused, already present paths, is information that was preprogrammed into the cells DNA from conception.

The information is inherited, not spontaneously generated.

There is no net gain of information.

To say that because water does something[that in fact it does not], is proof that living cells containing DNA do something similar for the same reason, is a logical fallacy.

Good thing I never said that then, isn't it? The stream was just an example of a self-adjusting system that "makes engineering decisions" in the absence of an engineer or decider. It wasn't meant to prove anything about how cells work.

The brains ability to re-route signals from damaged paths to unused, already present paths,...

They are not necessarily already present: "When an individual has a significant injury to the brain, several things can cause improvement....Over the long term, there can also be sprouting of dendrites in the brain. The remaining neurons sprout, establishing new connections. After a traumatic brain injury, the brain tries to recover by creating new pathways."

http://www.vistacentre.ca/brain_info.html

Now, I expect you to say that that ability was preprogrammed into the brain. You're welcome to believe that if you like, but I don't know how you'd demonstrate it.