Evolution and humans: big brain size or use (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 27, 2017, 20:32 (2704 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: The brain, you keep telling us, is only a RECEIVER. And so according to your own beliefs, it is the independent conscious self that thinks of a spear and tells the brain to enlarge so that the body can make and use the spear. Where do you think ideas come from: your receiver brain or your conscious self? Do please answer.

I don't know why you have understood my view. The brain is an active receiver of consciousness about which I have many times said that in a way the brain is a computer using consciousness as a software, an inexact analogy but it expresses my concept. I use my consciousness through my brain just as I direct my conputer at my keyboard.

dhw: Perhaps, though, you should direct your hostility towards those who misrepresent Darwinism or who defend those aspects of his theory which even he might well have rejected if he had known what we know now.

I don't blame Darwin. He didn't know what he didn't know. My hostility is toward the non-thinking Darwinists.

DAVID: I don't know if she has religious thoughts, but her whole work smells of teleology as humans appear in their earlier forms, and previous monkey forms have minor changes with no immediate benefit, but are obviously preparatory for bipedalism.

dhw: I can’t whiff any teleology in her work, and you are simply guessing that the changes had no benefit. Malassé actually suggests that the changes may denote “conceptual and creative innovations well before homo habilis”, so you certainly can’t derive your assumption from her work.

DAVID: And who made those innovations?

dhw: The hominins!

My comment is misunderstood. God made the bodily innovations. And how did the hominins make their innovations? Using a big brain they were given as a new species.

dhw: I have pointed out that even you can see no sense in your theory that God preprogrammed or dabbled all these different itsy-bitsy twiddles and all the hominins and all the pre-whales when all he really wanted to do was produce sapiens.

It all makes perfect sense if you accept balance of nature as a necessary part of evolution. And if you accept that God uses evolutionary processes to make the universe, the Earth, and evolved life to the point that humans appear. But you don't want to accept God. If you accepted what I present as 'evidence' you would have to accept God. So be it. We'll continue the debate.