Brain complexity: more important than size (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 27, 2017, 14:22 (2553 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I keep explaining the jumps, and you keep telling me I haven’t explained them!
(I shan’t reproduce the explanation yet again.)

DAVID: You have declared a jump in size (see bold) but not how it happened because as we both know we do not understand speciation. I firmly believe only God can do it.

We know that the brain changes in response to new concepts. We know that muscles expand with exercise. We know that cell communities change their structures during processes of adaptation. Maybe the same process can explain speciation. No, I can’t tell you HOW they do it, but it has to be some kind of autonomous mechanism (possibly designed by your God), unless you think your God popped down and changed the structure of individual bacteria, fish, whales, hominids – or programmed the first cells with every single change for the rest of time.

DAVID: Note in sapiens that the brain shrinks with 300,000 years of concepts, and there is no proof we cannot handle a bigger skull size. Neanderthals had one!

I keep explaining that the shrinkage must be due to the efficiency of complexification. You have even quoted me below (I’ve bolded it for you). And it was you who earlier said that sci-fi imaginings of humans with huge heads were rubbish. There has to be a limit.

DAVID: The H. sapiens brain is 300,000 years old, and in the past 10,000 years filled with an enormous number of new concepts filling huge libraries of books, and has gotten a little smaller recently. This is precisely opposite to your theory.
dhw: […] 10,000 years ago bright individuals came up with concepts that others built on. Result: ever increasing complexity of brain (process so efficient that brains shrink, or discard cells no longer required) as new concepts implemented – process proven by modern science. Brains do not complexify BEFORE required to do so. They complexify in response to new demands. “This is precisely opposite to your theory.”

DAVID: Yes it is as yours it totally backward to the evidence we have in sapiens knowledge and skull shrinkage.

You are clutching at the same straw that has already been screwed up and thrown away. Shrinkage has been explained as above. Do you or do you not accept the findings of modern science that the brain changes in response to concepts, and not in anticipation of them?

dhw: […] If he gave organisms (including hominins) the method to fashion their own evolution because he wanted to leave them free to do it their own way, he does not completely control the way they evolve. He is in control in the sense that their autonomous quest for survival/improvement is what he wants.
DAVID: And if they go down a rabbit hole He doesn't want, then what?

If he exists, he can interfere (e.g. Chixculub). That doesn’t mean he controlled every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder that ever occurred in the history of evolution.