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

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 20, 2016, 19:42 (2681 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

The NDE folks are shown heaven in some cases. The NDE only see dead folks they know. The NDE'ers feel emotion because they re not yet dead. Do you think there are tea parties or any other activities in heaven?

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.

dhw: 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.

But we are discussing the gaps in species and brain size, which jumps tremendously with each gap. Size first, more enlarged language second.

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.>

Plasticity is not required if bacteria have all the alternative pathways they need for any crisis from the beginning, which I think they do have.

DAVID: […] Our ancestors could only develop what was onboard at the start of a new species.

dhw: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.

With each new species, after the gap of development, new physiology in the brain is available for development. We agree.

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.

dhw: 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?

It is a simple concept. An inborn drive to complexity moderated by God. I can't be more specific than that since we do not understand speciation.

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.

dhw: 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.

We are in general agreement. Brain plasticity changes the brain each Homo species received in speciation.