This is bad teleological thinking. The cells don’t prefer anything.
This insight forms a large part of why I made the statements:
“this preference is what tends to result from natural selection on self-replicating molecules containing those genes”
“they will prefer even more (in the sense that their form optimizes for this under the constraint of history)” (emphasis added in both)
I used “preference” (and specified I was so using the term) to mean a regularity in the result of its behavior which is due to historical optimization under the constraint of natural selection on self-replicating molecules, not to mean that cells think teleologically, or have “preferences” in the sense that I do or that the colony of cells that you identify as do.
This insight forms a large part of why I made the statements:
“this preference is what tends to result from natural selection on self-replicating molecules containing those genes”
“they will prefer even more (in the sense that their form optimizes for this under the constraint of history)” (emphasis added in both)
I used “preference” (and specified I was so using the term) to mean a regularity in the result of its behavior which is due to historical optimization under the constraint of natural selection on self-replicating molecules, not to mean that cells think teleologically, or have “preferences” in the sense that I do or that the colony of cells that you identify as do.
Ah, ok. I misunderstood what you were saying.