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

by dhw, Friday, February 22, 2019, 13:09 (2099 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: From my standpoint, you are totally backwards, by agnostically ignoring God's role. "Demands directly drive" are pure Darwinism unproven theory. I view God as the designer and prime driver of Evolution. Therefore survival is an important part of how He designs the next stage in evolution, but it is always of secondary consideration compared to the design of the next more complex stage with must include provisions for necessary survival.

dhw: Back you go to your hatred of Darwin.

DAVID: I don't hate Darwin. I hate Darwinism, the stupid result of his thoughts being bastardized. He did base his theory on survivability, which has never been proven.

I have tried to explain below why survivability is sheer common sense. You have agreed to this and have called it an “immediate driving force”.

dhw: Of course demands/needs/requirements directly drive. Hunger directly drives you to look for food, danger directly drives you to look for protection, disease directly drives you to look for a cure, so why do you think the need to survive did not directly lead to the invention of flippers to improve pre-whales’ chances of survival in water, camouflage for cuttlefish to escape predators, migration for monarch butterflies to escape from the cold?

DAVID: You are still ignoring my primary point. God is running evolution in my view. God decides on the advances, and provides for survival in His designs as a primary requirement of His design. You want survival to be primary. I don't accept that view.

If, in your view of evolution, survival was a primary requirement of his design, then survival was a primary purpose for his designing the flippers, camouflage and migration. In most people's eyes, including your own, purpose would be regarded as a driving force. The fact that you believe his primary purpose in designing them and all the other products of life and evolution extant and extinct was to keep life going until he could design the brain of H. sapiens does not alter the fact that a "primary requirement" amounts to a primary “immediate driving force” (your own words). The accumulation of all these innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders constitutes the history of evolution. That does not contradict your theory that “God is running evolution”.

dhw: ...you keep refusing to acknowledge my agreement with you that if God exists, of course he is the designer and prime driver of Evolution. That is why all the hypotheses I have offered you include your God.

DAVID: I accept that you look at the possibility God exists. Why wouldn't you as a agnostic?

Then please stop implying that my agnosticism in some way attempts to exclude God, as in such statements as “I’ve agreed your views are logical, but only if God is not the designer.” See my Chixculub comment below.

dhw: I have asked you to explain why he specially designed different dragonfly reproductive systems if his sole purpose was to specially design H. sapiens. You had written that it was “not ‘beyond our comprehension’, only yours in this discussion.” So once more, please explain it.

DAVID: Ad nauseum. Part of the food supply balance of nature.

We have agreed ad nauseam that all organisms need food, the balance of nature has constantly changed throughout the history of life, it always depends on conditions and a particular hierarchy of organisms, and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the argument that your God’s sole purpose from the very beginning was to design the brain of H. sapiens. Or do you honestly believe that your God could not have designed the brain of H. sapiens if he hadn’t designed particular econiches in which dragonflies had different reproductive systems?

DAVID: (under “Chixculub and volcanoes”: Whatever the cause dinosaurs had to go to allow mammals to proliferate.

Yes, when Chixculub struck, the balance of nature changed, which of course makes us wonder why he would have bothered to specially design dinosaurs in the first place if his one and only purpose was to specially design the brain of H. sapiens. You accept the logic of my different explanations – e.g. this was not his one and only purpose, or he didn’t specially design the dinosaurs, the flippers, the slug poison and the different dragonfly reproductive systems (but may have designed the mechanism that enabled the organisms to do their own designing), or he didn’t know how to achieve his one and only purpose, or the purpose did not occur to him until late in the process - but for some reason you think all of these remove your God as the designer.