Different in degree or kind: big brain evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 20, 2016, 13:05 (2678 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I think the soul is added to universal consciousness, but I think its information is fixed, nothing added.
dhw: Although this is a side issue in the present context, it’s important in its own right. If nothing is added, i.e. no new information, there is no individual afterlife. That may well be true, but it goes against all the accounts of NDE patients, who remain themselves and undergo new experiences.
DAVID: Your view is confused. If life is truly over no new information is added. NDE folks are not dead in the final sense. They can be given info that they will live and come back later. Afterlife is static, nothing changes, no new experiences other than greeting NDE's.

The patients make all kinds of claims, involving new people, new emotions, a different world, being given information they did not have beforehand. I’m not trying to make a case either way. I’m merely pointing out that if nothing can be added, there is no afterlife for the individual. There is only death. And that is not what those patients reported.

DAVID: If there is a huge gap in species type, i.e., H. habilis vs. H. erectus, vs. H sapiens of course 'lots of genes' are involved. We don't see stepwise tiny steps so the gaps are huge, the gene changes very multiplied and must be presumed to occur all at once to fit the 'gap' evidence.

I don’t understand why suddenly you are talking about gaps and tiny steps. These were different species of hominid. Just as there are different species of ape. I thought we were discussing how the human brain grew bigger and human intelligence evolved – not the general, unsolved mystery of speciation.

DAVID: You make it sound simple but the brain had to be given the ability of plasticity. What if the brain didn't have that? I think God supplied that attribute.
dhw: Plasticity had to be given to cells from the very beginning of life, or evolution could never have taken place. They only lose their plasticity when they are assigned a particular fixed role (though stem cells remain plastic).
DAVID: Now you are agreeing with me. The original bacteria were loaded with multiple metabolic pathways in order to survive 3.6-8 billion years.

I said nothing about metabolic pathways. Cells/bacteria had to have the capacity for change, which means plasticity. You think your God programmed them with every solution to every problem for 3.8 billion years and onwards, and I suggest that, if he exists, he gave them the intelligence to work out their own solutions. Plasticity is required for both hypotheses.

DAVID: I really doubt that thoughts create new physiology. I can think I want to exercise and enlarge muscles, increase heart strength, but noting more happens.dhw: What I am proposing is not “new physiology” – it is development of existing physiology.
DAVID: […] Our ancestors could only develop what was onboard at the start of a new species.

You are repeating what I have just said! You doubted “that thoughts create new physiology”, and I pointed out to you that they did not create new physiology but developed existing physiology, i.e. what was already on board.

DAVID: God lit the spark and guided the development. note, only one group of primates advanced in shotgun style, those that led to H. sapiens.
dhw: You yourself have drawn attention to the fact that there were several groups, and I don’t know what you mean by “shotgun style”.
DAVID: Shotgun: Either we are being fooled by species variants or there were a large number of pre-homos that emerged from the apes according to all the types found currently. It resembles the 'bush of life' that all of evolution shows, but just at a specific point in evolution when the drive to complexity worked on producing us.

This is as confusing as your whale scenario. If, as you insist, your God’s purpose was to produce sapiens, did all these other pre-sapiens/pre-whales “freewheel” their way into existence, independently of your God? Or did he specially create each one of them in order to…do what? Balance nature, i.e. keep life going until sapiens arrived? As if he couldn’t have specially created sapiens/whales in the first place?

DAVID: Thought cannot grow the complexity of brain beyond the size of the brain that exists. A newly sized larger brain must appear to do that. Did thought create a new species of brain? I strongly object to that idea. Brain first, new capacities for thought second.

Once again, I am not talking about a new “species of brain”. I am talking about the development of an existing brain. I am not arguing against the brain being the source of thoughts. However, I am suggesting that new circumstances resulted in our ancestors becoming more aware than their ancestors, and therefore having new thoughts which required more capacity and complexity of the brain, leading to a feedback process. The cell communities that form the body respond to new needs by making changes to themselves. We see it all the time in processes of adaptation. So maybe that is also what happened with the cell community of the brain.