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

by David Turell , Monday, February 18, 2019, 14:46 (2103 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Your own statements deny your conclusion in bolds. It is obvious the changes before the Cambrian, perhaps allowed it, but didn't drive it. The bacteria have always survived without the need the improve. Why did they bother to become multicellular? It had to be driven by some sort of force.

dhw: I keep pointing out that nobody knows why multicellularity began, as in the first sentence of my comment above!

This is a debate from two very different viewpoints. In my view God caused multicellularity.

dhw: Maybe some single intelligent cells found themselves in a new and tricky situation and decided they’d be better off if they joined forces. We know that bacteria themselves form colonies. Same principle.

But they always have remained bacteria.

dhw: The Cambrian is an extreme case which may have occurred because of a major change in the environment, as above, and my point is that the changes created new opportunities and new demands.

Environment does not drive massive change as in the Cambrian. Other than the arrival of more oxygen, the very simple Ediacarans had the same sea bottom space to live.

dhw: As with multicellularity generally, there were new forms of food (even your own hypothesis rests on the need for organisms to eat so that life can SURVIVE), and these in turn demanded new forms of acquiring food and of avoiding being eaten. The whole process mushroomed through the interdependence of environmental conditions and the organisms themselves, with all the innovations hingeing on what you have called the “immediate driving force” of survival. Why is that so difficult for you to imagine?

Survival is an immediate need when new species are created, if evolution is to continue, but there is no evidence that survival is an immediate driving force.

DAVID: I've said my positions are fixed, just as you are fixed on survival of the fittest, an unproven Darwinian trope, I don't think evolution was driven by any need for survival. It was built into each evolutionary stage by the designer. PAX means we have fixed defined positions, and will discuss from those. My acceptance of God's choice of method i s only inexplicable to your neutrally fixed mind.. Surprise! To me it is quite clear.

dhw: If you do not think whale flippers, monarch migration and cuttlefish camouflage were produced in order to improve chances of survival, but were all simply stages on the way to your God’s special design of the human brain, then please tell us how they are related to the human brain.

Silly thought. All of the evolutionary developments lead to Humans. That is history. Flippers or gills have no direct relationship to brains, except both exist in the same body..

dhw: As regards “choice of method”, three days ago you wrote: “Of course I do not know why God made his choice of evolving humans rather than a direct creation”, so how can the link between purpose and method be clear to you? I have offered you different hypotheses, the possibility of which you have accepted – hence our “pax” – but now back you go to the same combination which you yourself cannot understand.

I don't try to understand it. It has to be seen as a chosen method since it follows the live of factual history..

xxxxx

dhw: Thank you for all the other new posts. I don’t feel that any of them require comment from me. It is tempting to use the one on “space representation” to re-open discussions on materialism versus dualism and on your contention that the human brain had to be specially designed, as opposed to evolving naturally from earlier brains. However, this would only result in yet more repetition of arguments already flogged to dead horsedom!

Exactly the point. I do not believe in natural evolution