Chimps \'r\' not us: the role of gene enhancers (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 04, 2018, 20:05 (2279 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You still don't see that you are talking about individual survival. When sapiens arrived they had the total capacity to easily survive and create civilization. I questioned the delay for using their capacity as an answer to your 'push' theory about big brains, nothing more. It took 270,000 years for sapiens to discover their real capbilities. That is simply the history of our species. My point still remains. We evolved way beyond any needs for simple survivability, which makes us special.

dhw: You leap from one subject to another! Survival means the continued existence of individual organisms. You can’t have life without individual organisms that are alive. You dismissed survivability as an evolutionary driving force, and that totally contradicts everything you have said about evolution up to 30,000 years ago, during which time you say survivability was the ONLY issue. Your purpose was to knock Darwin, though in fact you supported him. Now you lurch back to the 270,000 year “gap”, which I have suggested is due to the fact that it requires very clever individuals of ALL species to come up with innovative ideas. Erectus hung around for one or two million years without making any progress beyond survivability. (And you can’t tell me why your God let him hang around that long before at last producing the one brain he really wanted to produce.) And now, as your grand finale, you switch the whole argument to our being special. Yes, we are special. That doesn’t make us the be-all and end-all of life on Earth. Nor does it prove that survivability is a minor issue, or no issue at all. Nor does it explain why your God took billions of years to produce the one thing he wanted to produce. And the 270,000 year gap is a non-issue. See also my post on “multicellularity” for what drives evolution.

I'm still discussing survival of a human species, not individuals. At one point in our sapiens evolution it us thought we were down to 10,000 individuals, but the species grew larger in numbers and survived. It is called the 'bottleneck'. And I don't know why God took so long. Your question to me is totally unreasonable. My simple answer is He preposed evolving each step. That is obvious from the history .