Big brain evolution: brain size and intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell @, Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 20:28 (2154 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Neat sidestep. Your version of God's role is simply a different role for God than I grant Him. Evolution ended up with humans, a most unexpected outcome. If you will agree with me that God did it by whatever mechanism, what are we debating?

dhw: There is no sidestep. I cannot explain how the complexities of life and consciousness came into being, which is why I remain an agnostic. You have quoted me above, and then ignored what you have quoted! What we are debating is not God’s existence, which remains an open question for me, but how evolution works and, if your God exists, what might have been his motives. We are therefore debating two totally different answers to both these questions.

I understand your agnosticism. There is no debate for me that God wanted to produce humans and used evolution to do it. What mechanism beside God could have reasonably accomplished the result we see?


DAVID’s comment (under “memory at molecular level”): The work of the s/s/c is represented by work at the molecular level. No way to separate the material and the immaterial.
dhw: Of course you can’t separate them. The s/s/c does the thinking and the molecules do the implementing. In life you can’t have one without the other. But that does not mean they have the same FUNCTION.
DAVID: Of course they have different functions. You seem to object to my reviewing where in the brain the interlocking is required to take place.

dhw: I have no objection whatsoever. Since you now agree that in dualism the “soul” functions as the thinker of thoughts and the brain/body as the implementer of thoughts, you have no grounds for your insistence that your God had to expand the pre-sapiens brain before pre-sapiens could think up new concepts.

Yes, I do. Using my software/hardware analogy, only an complex brain can be the home for complex s/s/c thought. The artifacts show it.


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