Revisiting language and brain expansion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, February 07, 2020, 02:03 (1750 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I've not ignored your unreasonable thinking. Overall shrinkage is not large, but is a definite result of complexification.

dhw: Thank you for agreeing with me. Nothing to do with your God fiddling, then. So the cells might have decided for themselves on shrinkage.

God gave the local enlargement mechanism as part of the complexification mechanism

DAVID: Enlargement of very special areas (cabbies, reading) is a very special plasticity of the brain, both processes part of the plasticity process give to the brain by God, as He managed the evolution of the unique human brain.

dhw: Yes, the brain is plastic. So too are all the other cell communities to the extent that they are capable of making changes to themselves in response to new demands, as is proved over and over again by adaptation. What do you mean by “managed the evolution of the brain”? Why is this “unreasonable”?

Simple. I accept that God designed these mechanisms. Your cells magically replacing God is what I object to.

DAVID: You keep bringing up your cellular committee system of evolutionary design, denying God his right to keep full control. Your view of God is strange, to say the least.

dhw: This is one your weirder distortions. How is it a denial of God’s “rights” to suggest that he DID NOT WANT full control, but that he WANTED precisely what history shows us

You forget, my view of God is that He is fully purposeful. No distortion. My God does not have humanized sugestions like yours.

dhw: IN MY THEORY CELLS DO NOT PLAN FOR THE FUTURE, THEY RESPOND TO PRESENT DEMANDS. THEY DO NOT PLAN. THEY RESPOND. THERE IS NO FORETELLING OF THE FUTURE.

I know that is your theory, which does not explain the gaps, which require design.

DAVID: There is evidence they have design capacity, only epigenetic minor modifications within the same species. My firm explanation for speciation is a designer. I accept nothing else.

dhw: I know you have made up your mind. And I keep asking you questions about your explanations (not about design but about the motives, abilities and methods you impose on your designer), and the only answers I get are that you have no idea, we can’t “know”, why bother?

DAVID: The usual distortion of my views. I cannot know God's reasoning about how He arrived at his motives.

dhw: You cannot know his motives, and his motives are his reasons, and you have specified them in your illogical theory, repeated below. Please stop messing about with language.

DAVID: But I know what He did.

dhw: What you “know” is what the rest of us “know”: if he exists, he somehow produced the great changing bush of life, with humans as the latest branch. That is all we “know”. But you pretend you “know” that humans were his only motive/reason, and you have no idea why, with his total powers, he produced the great changing bush as an “interim goal” to keep life going and to cover the time till he produced the only thing he wanted to produce.

Like Adler, I can reason that our unusual status allows us to accept us logically as His purpose. "The difference of Man and the Difference it Makes".