Chimp vs. human brain (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 09, 2012, 20:18 (4164 days ago) @ David Turell

On this thread, I am grappling with David's belief that God planned evolution to culminate in human consciousness.-dhw: Do you think God deliberately tinkered with the brain mechanisms of our distant ancestors, and also with the genetic makeup of spiders, eagles and elephants, or do you think they all developed naturally from the adaptive and innovative mechanisms that drive evolution?-DAVID: I believe that DNAS has a complexification drive coded into it. God works by evolution. Start simple and build to the complex. The bacteria have been around successfully for 3.6 billion years. Why did multicellularity appear, except to allow for sexuality and greater diversity of complexity.
We all know what happened. I still want to know why.-Since I have difficulty in accepting both the concept of a UI and your notion of preplanning, I'm considering alternative explanations. We all agree that complexification happened, and that there must be a mechanism that enabled it to do so. Your question "why" automatically implies purpose, and I'm challenging the purpose you propose (i.e. the creation of human consciousness), since I cannot believe that the billions of extinct species and the billions of unrelated species were all essential for the production of humans. We are left then with an inventive mechanism that has produced myriad species without any particular end product in mind. To illustrate the problem:
 
DAVID:(under Ch 16, A mad world): The spider gets its instinct from coding in its DNA. But where did the information for that coding come from. Not thin air. there must be intelligence with information to impart. That is the reasoning bridge you should cross.-I agree that there must be intelligence imparting information. The problem lies in where the intelligence and information came from, and so my first question still applies: Do you believe that 1) God tinkered with an existing spider's abdomen, 2) that he created web-spinning spiders separately, 3) that he planned web-spinning when he invented the first mechanisms for reproduction, heredity, adaptation and innovation, or 4) that web-spinning happened through the inventive intelligence of those mechanisms being brought into play when the environment allowed for such inventions? Needless to say, the question has a crucial bearing on your evolutionary teleology!