Human evolution; our feet differ from apes. (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, March 05, 2020, 11:51 (1722 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: We cannot expect an inch by inch fossil record leading from one species to another. Every single find is hailed as momentous precisely because it is almost miraculous for bones to survive for thousands and millions of years. You claim that the gaps mean God stepped in and did a dabble (and presumably did more and more dabbles as, with his unlimited powers, he apparently continued to assemble and then discard all the different hominins and homos on his way to designing the only one he really wanted, which was us). Your alternative is a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for stiff transverse arches, which suddenly switched itself on. I’m afraid I don’t find this theory even remotely as believable as that of the absence of fossils, plus the fact that in accordance with the theory that changing environmental conditions are the trigger for adaptation and innovation, the long periods of stasis between environmental upheavals inevitably create “gaps” (hence Gould’s punc-inc, which I regard as perfectly logical).

DAVID: All we can see about the gaps is larger brains and more complexity of artifacts appear simultaneously. The complexity of the artifacts strongly implies the new brain is more complex and made the new artifacts. For some weird line of thinking you want the old brain to create the new artifacts and suddenly jump in size and appear simultaneously with them.

We were talking about transverse arches, and for some reason you have switched back to brains – dealt with under “half a brain”. My paragraph above dealt with the gaps, and compared your theory to my own and to Gould’s. I’m afraid I would regard your theory, bolded above, as rather more weird than my own – but of course that is a merely an opinion which is just as subjective as your own.