Brain Expansion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 22, 2020, 22:17 (1674 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Your suggestion is not close to fact. I've read a theoretical article I have not presented that theorized the human brain could ideally reach 3,300 cc! Please try to convert to ounces: 2,000 extra cc are only seventy ounces. You think our muscles can't handle that? Back packs are much heavier.

dhw: My suggestion is not close to fact because you’ve read a theoretical article!

Reminder!! You stated your previous size theory suggestion as fact

dhw: [..] explain to me why your God deliberately produced the gaps.

DAVID: Not contrived gaps, deliberate evolutionary advances. And it is you who keeps complaining about a patient God, who should be impatient. How else to analyze your God mantra?

dhw: How can a gap be an advance? If your all-powerful God wants a sapiens brain and eventually designs it directly, how do all the gaps advance the process? There is no patience or impatience involved. That is another of your inventions. Now please answer my question.

Obvious, why the question? The gap in size is an advance in more neuron networks in the prefrontal area. More ability to think once it is learned to be used, by trading simple ideas, gradually developing more complex ones.

DAVID: You don't deny the delays in use, so why demand it needs explanation? it is all of a pattern. Each new larger size had to be learned to be used. Do you think erectus or sapiens had bright new thoughts the first day they arrived as adult thinkers. My view of evolutionary changes take time.

dhw: I keep asking you what you mean by “learn to use” (divine lessons, instruction manuals, for sapiens 260,000 years of trial and nothing but error?). Never answered.

Why can't you envision self-learning with a new instrument? Developing new info (your mantra) and new simple concepts exchanged with others

dhw: Firstly, what is your explanation for shrinkage, since apparently you now refuse to accept the explanation you have accepted umpteen times before (the efficiency of complexification)?

DAVID: Distortion as usual. Of course the 150 cc shrinkage was due to more use and complexification. Note the stock answer I gave above, as usual.

dhw: I ask why he needed to go through all the other brain phases if all he wanted was ours. My (unproven) theory is that further expansion would have been deleterious, and so complexification and minor expansion took over.

And the scientific proposal I noted about doubling size, wasn't worried about your deleterious imagined concern. I will ask: Why deleterious?

dhw: You have acknowledged that your God gave our brains the ability to complexify and mini-expand without his intervention. Why should he not have done the same with earlier brains?

DAVID: Mini-expansion and complexification with shrinkage is not giant enlargement

[dhw: 2000 cc is nothing, but 200 cc is “giant”] [..]

Totally off the point of your 'deleterious' enlargement.

dhw: Once again you simply refuse to answer the question! It is you who told us that your God gave our brains the ability to complexify and mini-expand without his intervention! Do you think he was incapable of inventing the means to maxi-expand without his intervention?

God is capable of whatever you wish to propose, but it would help if you tried to analyze from exactly what God produced as a guide to thoughts about His purpose. From the evidence God is very powerful in his ability to create. What He created is what we see. Of course you can create abilities for God that I don't think He used. My God, to use your words is the 'control freak' you bring up as a supposed derogatory term. Nothing wrong with God firmly in control. Your idea again relinquishes God from carefully designing each step in brain enlargement/complexity. The complexity of our brain is still overwhelming us in trying to understand how it works. Once again you want a weak God who gives up control and allows newly-sized brains to self-invent their new size and networks. That implies they are already as smart as God in engineering brains. Then why do they need any further improvement? You have invented a theory with no substance, just seizing on the fact that our brain, with its massive complexity, well beyond those previous iterations, can have very small areas of enlargement to handle new mental and muscular activities. You are trying to make grapes into pineapples.