By FRANS de WAAL: refuted (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 14, 2016, 12:12 (2930 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: My contention, however, is that the vast complexities of our thought and of our behaviour are natural advances on the thought and behaviour that we have inherited from our animal ancestors: they have social structures, they explore their environment, they communicate, take decisions, have emotions, help one another, play games, and even have aesthetic values (mainly for mating purposes) etc. Not the same as ours, and on nothing like the scale of complexity that we have reached with our enhanced consciousness. But in my view these are not minor similarities. They are the foundations on which we have built our own thought and behaviour.

DAVID: A foundation? Of course. Did we build brick by brick on their foundation? No. We took a giant leap which you always want to diminish in order to suggest a continuity of tiny steps in evolution...

Hold on. Yes, we did quite literally build brick by brick on their foundation. The giant leap, which I acknowledge, is our enhanced consciousness. Everything else follows on from that. Our early ancestors lived in caves, like their fellow animals, but then they started to build, and brick by brick their buildings “evolved” from the simplest of huts to the colossal edifices of modern architecture. The same process applies to all the other manifestations of our enhanced consciousness – all built brick by brick on the foundations we have inherited.

DAVID: You cannot accept our vast difference as a true jump beyond the type of change we see prior to the development of a series of humans. What changed the pace of evolution in the past eight million years? We don't see stress or serious environmental change as the appearance of increased oxygen in the Cambrian. Other primates hardly changed in that period, but we leapt forward. An intervention by God is the best explanation.

I keep emphasizing that stress is not the only factor, but you refuse to accept the drive to improvement. Nobody knows how humans acquired their extra degrees of consciousness, but I have repeatedly accepted the possibility that there may be a God who dabbled. Whether that is the “best” explanation remains open to question, as does the existence of God, but you always revert to this mode of attack when I question your interpretation of evolution. It is perfectly possible to recognize the vast gap between our consciousness and that of our fellow animals without believing that every single innovation and natural wonder was specially designed by God to keep life going so that humans could appear. THAT is the disagreement between us.