Chimp vs. human brain (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, December 16, 2012, 00:40 (4158 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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,-My view of evolution is that it got complexer and complexer with great directionality. I don't see anything of 2-5 in it. The Cambrian Explosion beautifully set up all our animal phyla 540 million year ago with brains appearing, and here we are with a giant brain.-> 
> 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. 
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> dhw: 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.-The picket fence is apparent. I don't buy inerference.
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> 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?
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> dhw: 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? -We descended from early primates and became quite different. Our posture is totally different. We have much more useful hands with our opposible thumbs, and our brains are enormously different. 
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> dhw: 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. -I agree.-> dhw:The idea that this vast variety (most of which are extinct) was from the outset designed to produce one single species does not. -Remember that we eat each other. I think the variety of life idea encompasses the balance of nature. The species are set up to thrive off each other. When the balance is thrown out of kilter there are sad results. Think of the problems the Australians are having with the inappropriate species that were introduced. -The early humans in Africa lived on plants, and then in Southern Africa ussed the shoreline animals as they developed. These are very current theories that have been advanced. The variety and availabilty of edibles is very inportant. -And remember convergence. Evolution is set up as very inventive and very creative. Nature's wonders are another example. It is no surprise we have the bush, not a tree.-I think your viewpoint is too narrow.