Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 30, 2016, 13:16 (2764 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: How gradual is gradual, and how sudden is saltation? How many generations count as sudden? For all we know, once humans found the need to make new sounds, the anatomical changes could have perfected themselves within what, three, four, five generations? 
DAVID: For anatomic changes the saltations are results of larger jumps in phenotype. You are again suggesting slight changes in fossils; not found! - It is you who have said the changes were major, but it makes no difference to the argument. Bearing in mind the fact that we know organisms can respond very swiftly to need by changing their own structure (as in adaptation), it seems to me more likely that the changes resulted from the need for new sounds, to express the expanding range of subject-matter arising from enhanced consciousness, than from your God changing human anatomy tens of thousands of years in advance, and humans later on finding that they could make new sounds, and consequently inventing language.
 
Meanwhile, I do wish you would let me know whether you think your God provided fish with fully formed legs before they stepped out onto dry land, and if not, whether you think fins changed to legs within a single generation.
 
DAVID: This article discusses development of brain usage, that is the brain of 200,000 years ago, the same size as yours or mine, through the property of plasticity, had to learn how to be used:
http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the-modern-mind-may-be-100000-years-old - David's comment: Brain use is no different than speech development. Great very long article, worth a read. - Agreed on all counts. If only we knew the origin of consciousness, we might find out whether consciousness enlarged the brain, or the enlarged brain caused consciousness. With your belief in dualism, I'd have thought it would be the former (since the brain is only a receiver). If so, enhanced consciousness required changes in the brain, just as it required changes in the larynx, uvula etc. to allow for new sounds. And of course brain use and language have evolved as each generation builds on the progress of its predecessors.
 
It is indeed a great article, for which many thanks. The author clearly thinks that the origins of modern human culture go back much further than was previously thought. Probably no need to imagine that 200,000 years ago the great brain hung around doing nothing. Simple beginnings, growing complexity - just like language. I really like his conclusion: - Now it's not so much a question of if the date of the “creative explosion” should be pushed back as a question of how far it should be pushed back. It is starting to look more as if this suite of symbolic practices from the “fully modern checklist” developed slowly, in Africa and the Near East, over a long period of time, rather than in a sudden burst.
Here in the present, we've been building on the mental achievements of those who came before us for so long that we rather assume that certain capacities, or ways of thinking, have always existed. That's one of the things I find most compelling about researching our deep history. If you study the time period when many of the cognitive skills we take for granted—communication, art, and abstract thinking—came into being, you realize that these people didn't have the shoulders of any giants to stand on: They were the original shoulders.