Introducing the brain;complexity: autopilot (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 12, 2018, 15:27 (1961 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You keep telling us that you do not regard survivability as playing any role in evolution. We are not just talking about humans, but even with humans you tell us your God deliberately expanded pre-human brains, and only then were they able to invent the tools, weapons, clothes etc. which served the sole purpose of improving their chances of survival. The single example of bipedalism – which I have suggested may well have originated through conditions that required the descent of SOME anthropoids, while others remained in the trees – does not cover the whole of evolution. And I would suggest that the brain’s evolution – whatever the method and timing of expansion – was always linked mainly to survival until humans as we know them reached a point of awareness that took them beyond the basic needs and into the realms of thought beyond survival.

DAVID: Survivability is pure Darwinism. The capabilities of early hominins were well beyond the need for survival as compared to the apes they left behind who did not need any changes to survive for the last eight million years of side by side development.

dhw: “Pure Darwinism” does not mean it is wrong! I have answered the point about apes in the paragraph you have quoted. Now please tell me: do you think the invention of clothes, tools, weapons had nothing to do with survival? And please tell me if you think that whale fins replacing legs, baleens replacing teeth, fish camouflaging themselves, butterflies migrating to warmer climates, spiders spinning webs etc. had nothing to do with improving their chances of survival.

Getting out of the trees or hopping into a watery environment resulted in severe challenges to survivability to the organisms who did it, and required major changes in phenotypical and physiological aspects of each climate jumper. If survival is such an important issue, why not stay put and take the easy road of continued life. That is why I say there is a drive to complexity from God to advance evolution, and then only He can design the necessary changes for survival. Advanced complexity requires survival designs for the new circumstances. Perfectly logical. Suviveability is secondary to advancing complexity. Again Darwin was proposing survivability due to competition, a totally unproven jump in tautological thought.