Evolution and humans: big brain birth canal (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, November 06, 2018, 15:01 (2207 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Unfortunately, we have no record of precisely how big individual foetuses and canals were year by year, but I do not see how logic dictates that a sourceless, unknown and unknowable mind either dabbled or preprogrammed sudden expansions of foetuses and canals plus the billions of other innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders throughout the history of life

DAVID: Yet you admit design is required.

dhw: Yes. Must I repeat that my hypothesis is that the design is done by the cell communities using their possibly God-given intelligence to respond to new needs?

DAVID: Yes, back to using God, who cannot be avoided in the discussion

dhw: Of course God can’t be avoided. I am an agnostic, not an atheist. My hypothesis leaves open the question of origin - it is POSSIBLY God, possibly chance, possibly some form of panpsychism.

dhw: [...] As for cells, must I really keep repeating that (a) my proposal is that evolution does NOT advance through fortune-telling but through RESPONSES to present conditions, and (b) that there is no proof for any of the hypotheses, but I regard my own hypothesis as considerably more logical than yours (bearing in mind that I do not reject the possibility that there is a God who designed the mechanism).

DAVID: Yes, back to design is required, and the only evidence we currently have is simply that only minds design.

dhw: Which does not mean that there is a single, sourceless, unknown, unknowable mind that did the designing. Maybe cells have the equivalent of what we call “mind”. (See also under “Genome complexity”)

DAVID: Only neurons can be organized into a mind that can design. Are your 'cells' somehow magically neurons?

dhw: An astonishing statement from someone who claims to be a dualist, and an astonishing assumption which runs counter to your admission that cellular problem-solving can “just as well” be interpreted as automatic – which puts automaticity on a par with the hypothesis that non-neurons can be autonomously intelligent, as advocated by some scientists who have spent a lifetime studying them.

The automaticity discussion involves intracellular reactions, not inventing a new pelvis, which is the subject under discussion. Your lifetime group studied cells not major evolutionary changes. Your hypothesis is a huge extrapolation from the single cell reactions to whole body alterations.