Big brain evolution: comparing chimp and brain organoids (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 12, 2019, 13:03 (2109 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Current brain evidence is all we have to go on, and we KNOW that new activities and usage make changes to the brain. I thought you believed in common descent, and so I really don’t see how expansion of the brain, i.e. an increase in the capacity of existing brains through additional cells and connections, requires new design. The example of taxi drivers and musicians makes it clear that expansion of parts of the brain can result from usage.

DAVID: The subject of this entry was the difference in chimp and human brains. You answer makes no sense. What is demonstrated above is a vast difference in frontal lobes between chimp and humans. That requires design.

You are talking as if there was a sudden leap from chimp to H. sapiens. What both you and the article have failed to acknowledge is the many stages of evolution between chimp brain and H. sapiens brain. And yet you believe in common descent. Once more, then, we have to go back to the only explanations you will accept: 1) either your God provided the very first cells with a programme to change the brains (and female pelvises) of a group of apes and force them out of the trees for no particular reason, and then at intervals of millions of years more programmes were automatically switched on to change the brains of their descendants, or 2) your God picked out a group, and then later groups, and popped in to perform all the necessary operations himself on all the individuals in those groups (= dabbled). And all this happened because, even though the only brain he wanted right from the start was that of H. sapiens, he either couldn’t or didn’t want to design it until he’d specially designed all the other brains plus 3.5 billion years’ worth of other life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders. But this apparently makes sense to you.