Chimp vs. human brain (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 15, 2012, 20:00 (4362 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If the UI set up evolution to complexify and reach us, as I propose, then complexity will come with a bush of life and we will appear as the pinnacle of the bush, with lots of branches. -Well, yes, if your UI wanted to create lots and lots of bushy branches (= complexity) and to finish up with us, we would indeed have lots and lots of bushy branches (= complexity) and would finish up with us. See below for more options.
 
Dhw: My point is that the higgledy-piggledy bush is the exact opposite of what we would expect from a designed process with a pre-planned purpose. -DAVID: Of course it is h-p, striving for complexity in many directions, not a straight course to us. If the UI in its wisdom wanted that approach, that is what we would see. But we don't see that. We must adhere to what we see, in judging the teleology. Bush it is.1) -So the argument is: 1) God's purpose was to create homo sapiens AND a higgledy-piggledy bush of comings and goings from tiddly-pops to homo sapiens. That is what we see, so that must be the approach God wanted. It's certainly what we see, but how does that tell us what God wanted? Try these for size: 2) God's purpose was to have fun with a totally unpredictable game of higgledy-piggledy; 3) God's purpose was to experiment with life to see what he could do with it, creating this, destroying that; 4) God had no particular purpose in creating life, and left it to sort itself out; 5) Life is one big, purposeless series of coincidences. All of these hypotheses could explain why what we see is a higgledy-piggledy bush of comings and goings from tiddly-pops to homo sapiens, and as you so wisely commented yourself: "I don't know why God used the pattern of evolution we see. He knows but he is not explaining." So what makes you so keen on 1)?-DAVID: Was there some degree of guidance? Yes. Again my example of the apes staying apes and doing just fine and us charging off with big heads, fully upright. There was no Darwinian reason for that to happen, but it did. -Darwin's reason was the same as for all innovations: random mutations. I don't buy that. "Guidance"? This can only mean detailed preprogramming within the first forms of life, or interference (= separate creation). I don't buy those either. But I'm an agnostic.
 
DAVID: We are different in kind, not degree. Difference by degree is not defensable. By my analysis we [may] not be in the primate family, but a new human family. The Darwin classification is old and by the new findings, wrong. Why stick to ideas 150 years old?-If we are not in the primate family, and you believe that all forms of life descended from earlier forms, what form do you think we descended from? Or are you really arguing now for special creation?-The idea that humans were the purpose for which God created life is thousands of years old. Why stick to ideas thousands of years old? The reason of course is that the age of the idea is irrelevant. Darwin's 150-year-old idea that all life forms descended from earlier forms makes sense to me. Innovation through random mutations does not. A mechanism that creates a vast variety of living forms makes sense to me. The idea that this vast variety (most of which are extinct) was from the outset designed to produce one single species does not. You have said that even for you it's not logical, but "God did it the way He wanted." And since we have no way of knowing what God wanted, why impose one particular purpose on him?