Brain complexity: learning new tasks (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 19, 2017, 14:27 (2561 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

David: Not according to me re' brain and skull. I'm simply repeating the known history of hominin evolution. And how do you know the brain has reached its optimum size? Are you now agreeing with me that this size brain was a goal?

TONY: Correction, according to the currently accepted story of human evolution. The facts are separate from the story used to explain them. The facts are objective, the story is not, and depends on both the context and the larger supporting narrative.
I've often noticed that many of the disagreements between David and DHW revolve around story telling. David focuses on facts, DHW tends to focus on narrative. It is not that either one of you ignore the other side of the coin, merely that your primary focus is different. Perhaps this stems from Davids background in science and DHW's background with literature.

Welcome back. I hope David is as flattered as I am that you have spent some time theorizing about us! Alas, though, I can’t agree with your theory. David and I agree that humans are here as a result of evolution (you won’t agree about evolution), which has produced a vast bush of organisms, lifestyles and natural wonders. Those are our “facts”. David’s “story” is that there is a God who started out with the intention of producing the brain of Homo sapiens, and apart from some personal dabbling, he preprogrammed the whole bush 3.8 billion years ago to keep life going until we saps arrived. (David will correct this if it’s wrong.)

I see no logical coherence in this “story”, and instead offer the theistic “story” (I’m an agnostic, so I include the possibility of a God) that God designed a mechanism (let’s call it cellular intelligence) whereby organisms did their own designing, and the human brain, like the whole higgledy-piggledy bush, is a natural development of the constant evolutionary drive of cellular communities (= organisms) for survival and/or improvement. Same facts, different stories. I’m afraid David’s explanation of his God’s evolutionary purpose and method has nothing whatsoever to do with science, while my own, though based initially on the findings of some eminent scientists regarding cellular intelligence, cannot claim to have scientific evidence that such a mechanism exists beyond one for minor adaptations. But David agrees that my story joins the “facts” together coherently. I shan’t go into detail over the numerous anomalies that have arisen out of his story.