Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 09, 2018, 18:22 (2388 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The 'generally' covers the fact that the pfc must reach into the hippocampus and other areas for memory facts while studying a problem. The soul uses implementation areas already existing in other areas of the brain before the pfc enlarged. I keep telling you about the fact that enlargement is in a thought area, not an implementation region which all other primates have as we do, and that fact doesn't seem to be receptive to you.

dhw: I’m quite happy to accept that the enlargement is in a “thought area”, but you don’t seem to be receptive to the fact that new thoughts will require new connections to the rest of the brain if they are to be implemented. Those connections will have to begin in the “thought area”. Hence expansion.

Almost all the expansion is frontal cortex compared to ape brains. The implementation areas are not much changed.

Because whenever I pin you down to the nature of these “guidelines”, they turn out to be divine programming or dabbling, which removes the whole concept of autonomy.

God runs evolution in my view. You know that. Why are you surprised? Guidelines allow some latitude in the changes. I didn't say 'strict' guidelines.

dhw: We have been over this a hundred times. There had to be a limit to expansion, or sapiens would have finished with a head the size of an elephant’s.

DAVID: This is your unproven concept. No facts involved.

dhw: Of course. Nobody’s hypothesis has been proven – and that includes your own. Otherwise there would be nothing to discuss. However, that doesn’t in any way negate the logic of my argument. And I notice you have ignored the point that even your own shrinkage hypothesis now has new thoughts changing the brain instead of God changing the brain before the s/s/c can have new thoughts.

Shrinkage is evidence only in sapiens brains which are highly complex to begin with. But I've proposed shrinkage might have occurred in earlier forms, as a degree of brain plasticity present in earlier hominins, which process we inherited. Shrinkage negates your point that the pressure of thinking new concepts forces enlargement of brain and skull.

DAVID: From my concept that only a bigger computer can do more complex tasks.

dhw: Agreed. The s/s/c (software) thinks the tasks, and the brain (computer) “does” them.

My point assumes the s/s/c must use the brain networks to think during life.

DAVID: Your answer question is a non sequitur. I am discussing the complexity of this species change, to create a larger front of the brain: new skull and different mother's pelvis.

dhw: That is a fact, and I am not disputing it, so why do you keep bringing it up? In any case, I answered it in the same post: “any major change in any organism entails cooperation between the different cell communities that make up the whole body. Since you believe in common descent, you now seem to be telling us that God has to engineer every single major physical change in every single organism that descended from the first cells.”

I keep bringing it up because the speciation is so complex, and God has to do it. It is not 'now' that I have God running evolution. It is an 'always' concept of mine, and you know it. And yes, He might have given them an IM with guidelines of the type I have explained, not so strict as to allow some mild variations.