Evolution and humans: big brain size uses energy (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, November 16, 2017, 13:58 (2562 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Cell communities do not have the mental capacity to cause speciation. That is the point of intelligent design.
And later: Cells are not intelligent enough to arrange for speciation. Your hypothesis is a minnow of an idea expanded into whale.

dhw: Spoken with great authority, but I love the image! However, I still find my hypothesis more believable than one in which your God preprogrammes the first living cell to turn some of its descendants into minnows to turn into eight stages of whale so that they can provide food to keep life going until the programme produces various hominins and hominids and humans until it produces the brain of Homo sapiens and the duckbilled platypus.

DAVID: You are out of sequence. The platypus appeared millions of years before hominins.

Fair comment. I just like to bring it in as an example of all the weird and wonderful things your God either dabbled personally or preprogrammed to be passed on by the very first living cells. I just don’t understand why they required just as much of his personal attention as Homo sapiens: “I gotta specially design eight stages of whale, the weaverbird’s nest and the duckbilled platypus so life can go on until I specially design H.S. and his brain.” However, the next exchange seems to me to offer a much more promising approach:

DAVID’s comment (under "Universe too big"): It is possible the giant universe is to create galaxies all over the universe with humans!
dhw: Yep, and it’s possible that there are no other humans, that there are other forms of life, that there is no life at all, that there is a God, and that there is no God. So many things are possible, and currently we have no idea of the truth. It’s enough to drive a person to agnosticism.
DAVID: It is possible that God is experimenting with different types of humans, those with total free will and those which lesser amounts to see how their civilizations turn out.

Yes, anything is possible. And what a wonderfully “humanized” picture of your God you are now presenting to us. "Wow, look at them there wonders that my autonomous evolutionary mechanism has just thrown up...another type o' pre-whale, the weaver's nest and what is THAT? A duckbilled platypus! What a great show! Can't wait to see how evolution turns out next." And even: "Humans at last! Can't wait to see how their civilizations turn out!"