Brain expansion (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, June 13, 2020, 11:24 (1622 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Theistic version: instead of your God preprogramming or dabbling each advance in complexity, he gave cells the ability (intelligence) to do their own combining and cooperating.

DAVID: And I won't accept any theory which reduced the problems of future design to simple cells that have no idea what the future requires.

You persist in seeing evolution as a process of foretelling the future instead of responding to the present. We don’t know what caused speciation, but adaptation to new conditions must certainly have been a factor. Nobody has ever seen an organism adapt itself in anticipation of new conditions.

DAVID: With a bigger baby head arriving, the pelvis has to be bigger at the same time!

dhw: We have no idea how gradual this process was, but I am suggesting that until the pelvis had adapted to the new size of skull, there may well have been lots of dead babies and mothers. That is how adaptation works: one change demands others.

DAVID: Still illogically defending the obvious need for simultaneity. No one would ever survive under you illogical answer. Your 'adaptation' requires small changes, as Darwin thought. We know successive species made large cerebral jumps in size.

You seem to be saying that on Monday all skulls were 400 cc, and on Tuesday they were all 600 cc., and all pelvises enlarged from Monday to Tuesday. I don’t believe it. I stand by what I wrote above, and have no idea why you consider it to be illogical.

dhw: Originally you wrote: “God gave all early immune systems, animal and man the ability to develop a library of responses.” I would suggest that this means he gave them the autonomous ability to create or develop the library, and not that the cells of the immune system obeyed 3.8-billion-year-old instructions or were dabbled with “as infections occurred” and automatically held on to each instruction it had miraculously chosen from the programme or been supplied with via a dabble.

DAVID: Quit trying to reinterpret me. Immune cells know how to create antibodies to any and all antigens offered by infective agents. Each species with an immune system is so programmed.

Neither of has any option but to try and interpret what the other says. God giving animals and men the ability to develop a library of responses is quite different from God preprogramming every response.

DAVID (under “Immune system complexity”): These kinds of interlocking defense systems require careful design, with especial care not to allow attacks on one own's tissues, especially when the virus is located intracellularly. This is not something 'cell committees' can develop, since the mechanisms must be present when the organism first appears in evolution. Survival depends upon it.

If you believe in common descent, every organism will have inherited an immune system, all the way back to bacteria! You simply cannot accept the idea that when cell communities merge and cooperate, they will further develop whatever system they have inherited. If I were a theist, I would say that God gave cells/cell communities the ability to develop their own immune system to cope with whatever conditions they encountered. This requires intelligence. I would find that much easier to believe than a theory claiming that God anticipated every possible threat to every organism and therefore provided the first cells with a programme of instructions (to be passed on through the whole history of life) to deal with each threat as it arose.

DAVID: Cells can foresee the future requirements in your theory. That does not explain today's entry about the human cerebellum alterations from animals. Which brain cells did that foreseeing of our future socialization needs?

There is no foreseeing in my theory. All changes are made in response to changing conditions. I have responded separately to the vague hypothesis concerning the cerebellum.

dhw: So we have your God dabbling or preprogramming the changes in various brains and immune systems (since you now reject the idea of cells being able to develop their own library), and specially designing each of these human species - including those that became extinct before sapiens arrived - dabbling or preprogramming different attributes into them, and then preprogramming or dabbling a selection of those attributes into the only species he actually wanted to design, which was H. sapiens. Is that correct?

DAVID: Yes. God is a direct designer, of all that appears.

The above seems to me a very roundabout way of “directly” designing the only species (H. sapiens) he wanted to design, and this objection to your theory also applies, of course, to the directly designed bush of non-human life for 3.X billion years before he directly designed his first humans. This, of course, is not a criticism of God, but a criticism of your theory concerning God’s nature, motives and methods.