Human evolution; sticks and stones (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, January 14, 2018, 15:13 (2505 days ago) @ dhw

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DAVID: Of course the brain in an expanded form then produced more complex artifacts. That is my point in push pull which you just wiggled around. You want the desire to have new ideas push the brain to grow larger.

dhw: No, no, no! It is not the desire to have new ideas! It is the desire to IMPLEMENT new ideas offered (dualist version) by the "soul". You summarized the process yourself, though you desperately try to forget what you wrote under “new tasks”, 2 December at 15.07: “If habilis has an idea for spears, the idea is immaterial. No brain change. Once he learns to knapp flint, attach the stone point to a wooden rod, and then practices throwing it with accuracy, there is no question his brain has enlarged with all the muscle movement and visual coordination involved.” I could not have expressed it better myself.

No,no,no! There is an implied thought consistent with my unchanging thinking I left out in sloppy writing a quick response: "There is no question his brain [has been previously] enlarged with all the muscle movement, etc.... [Only a larger brain could permit all this new activity]." I should spend more time mapping out responses.

DAVID: I view it as a very wishful theory supported by no evidence. I prefer to start with evidence. It is an obvious time table that more advanced artifacts are the result of a larger brain. We had a larger brain 300,000 years ago, but the advanced artifacts only started to appear in the past 30,000 years in cave art. Your desire/push theory should have logically seen the brain produce when it appeared. Why the gap?

dhw: Yet again: when the brain reached its optimum size (maybe 300,000 years ago - the figure varies), NEW concepts were – and still are – implemented by complexification, not expansion. I don’t know enough about the history of 300,000 – 270,000 years ago to assume that sapiens made no progress at all (discoveries are being made all the time, but you seem to know it all already). Erectus could boast of a few advances with his enlarged brain, but went on for at least a million years, and possibly even two, without any mega-changes, so 270,000 years is hardly a problem timewise. New concepts come from individuals, so it took a while for the sapiens geniuses to come along. What does that prove?

What it proves is the new size is not used in any useful way for a gap in time. I think that happened with habilis and erectus also, Evolution builds on repeated patterns.

DAVID: As for obfuscations,' allow to develop' is exactly what my pull concept means. A soul can only go so far creating concepts operating in a much less complex, smaller, brain.

dhw: Still staying with your dualist approach (I will have to tackle the materialist approach in due course), souls will learn from other souls. Once a concept has been implemented, it will lead other souls to other concepts. A primitive spear, once it exists, will lead other souls to conceptualize more sophisticated weapons. In every case, the concept arises from the soul (dualistic approach), but the brain has to implement it, i.e. give it material form. The soul’s ability to conceptualize is therefore not limited by the size of the brain. The limitations arise out of what the soul already knows (humans are vastly more efficient than their fellow animals at passing on knowledge and building on what is already known) and of what can be materially implemented, and that is when the process you have described so perfectly comes into play: first through expansion, but now through complexification.

DAVID: Habilis could not have possibly conceived of what erectus developed, but erectus appeared because habilis desired it, is your aeryfairy idea.

dhw: I don’t know precisely how each individual species of hominid/hominin came into being any more than you know precisely why a God whose goal was to produce sapiens found it necessary to produce all these different species first, not to mention the weaverbird, duckbilled platypus and skull-shrinking shrew. We only know that brains expanded. Your hypothesis is that an unknown power named God preprogrammed each expansion or popped down to Earth to engineer them all. My hypothesis is that each expansion was the result of new ideas requiring new abilities. Another hypothesis is that each expansion resulted from random mutations. I don’t know why you consider the first of these to be any less airy-fairy than the second and third.

I am stuck with larger brains producing improved artifacts. You want push and I see pull with God's action.