dhw: big brain evolution:comparing chimp and brain organoids (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, April 07, 2019, 09:44 (2056 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The history of life shows us a vast diversity – not a straight line to H. sapiens.

DAVID: A goal of the human brain does not require a straight line development as you seem to demand, if evolution is used as the method.

dhw: Let me repeat that for you evolution apparently means your God specially designing or dabbling every development. Your statement amounts to saying: if God’s method of specially designing the human brain – his one and only purpose – entailed specially designing the whale’s flippers, the cuttlefish’s camouflage and the weaverbird’s nest, then there is no need for a straight human line. Unsurprisingly you have no idea why your God would have chosen this method to specially design the brain of H. sapiens! So maybe he didn’t specially design all the unrelated life forms, or maybe his sole purpose wasn’t to specially design the brain of H. sapiens. Once more, it is the combination of your hypotheses that makes no sense.

DAVID: As usual your objections make no sense. You do not recognize the extreme evolutionary event that human brain/consciousness represents, as Adler points out. You simply give lip service to our consciousness, without realizing the deep meaning it represents.

You know very well that I have never denied that human consciousness is exceptional. That does not mean it hasn’t evolved from lesser forms of consciousness, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the incongruity of your belief that your God’s purpose in specially designing whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage and the weaverbird’s nest was to keep life going until he could specially design our brain. Yet again you refuse to see that the problem lies in the combination of your hypotheses. Hence your “eternal question” below: why bother with all the whale changes if his one and only purpose was to design the human brain?

DAVID: You again ignore that your proposed 'goal of diversity' has its own secondary purpose of affording food supply so evolution can continue and therefore was part of God's purpose, but not a separate goal.

dhw: Of course evolution could not continue without food. That does not mean your God specially designed every single food chain for the sole purpose of letting life go on for 3.5+ billion years until he specially designed the brain of H. sapiens!

DAVID: How would life get to humans without the food chains? You keep refusing to accept humans are the goal. As long as that is your position we will never agree.

Yet again you keep refusing to accept that if the human brain – which according to you was specially designed by your God - was his one and only goal, it makes no sense that he should have specially designed billions of other life forms etc. to eat or not each other until he specially designed the only form he wanted to design! Hence the alternative hypotheses I have offered you, including one in which humans really were the goal: namely, he knew what he wanted, but didn’t know how to achieve it (i.e. an experimental God with limitations).

dhw: (transferred from “Early Whale”) May I suggest that over the course of time, the whale’s ancestors found life at sea to be more productive than life on land, and consequently the cell communities that form legs restructured themselves to form flippers, which are better adapted to life in the water. All the other changes would have taken place in the same way and for the same reason. Too obvious? I find this considerably more convincing than the theory that your God changed legs into flippers before pre-whales entered the water, and I would also like to know why he left these particular pre-whales with legs but gave them a tail.

DAVID: Yes, it is a fascinating transitional form, but never answers my eternal question: Why bother with all the attendant physiological changes required to be invented or designed.

dhw: But that is my eternal question to you! If your God’s one and only purpose was to specially design the brain of H. sapiens, why bother specially designing whale flippers and all the “attendant physiological changes”, not to mention every other non-human life form, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution? And that is why I ask you to consider the theistic possibility that ALL of these are the result of your God designing the mechanisms which enabled intelligent cell communities to restructure themselves in order to cope with or exploit changing environmental conditions.

DAVID: I've presented pre-programming strongly suggested in the other thread today.

Dealt with on that thread, and you still haven’t answered your own eternal question.