Brain expansion (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, June 14, 2020, 11:02 (1621 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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: No adaptation we have ever seen creates a new species. New species do handle future conditions. and the consideration cannot be ignored

Nobody has ever seen the creation of a new species! That is why we theorize. But it would be absurd to discount adaptation to new conditions as a factor. So please give me an example of a species that adapts itself to new conditions before those conditions arise. Of course some new species will also handle future conditions – otherwise every species would die out when conditions change!

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Do you still deny we have no evidence of tiny advancements? Just large gaps in size.

Do you expect to find fossils covering every single stage of an adaptation? We have very few fossils to cover thousands and thousands of years, and each find is a sensation. So please tell me whether you think the jumps took place overnight. If not, how long do you think they took? Why do you regard it as illogical that pelvises would adapt to the new size of skull, though there may have been many fatalities along the way?

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Whose intelligence? It is obvious the immune systems have the intelligent instructions to build the library.

The library is the instructions on how to cope with new infections. So if your God gave cells the ABILITY to build the library, he must have given them the ability to create the instructions – and that ability is what I call cellular intelligence.

dhw: 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: You have arrived at finally recognizing incorrectly my point about God's design of the immune systems. The immune cells are not innately intelligent. All infections can be handled in a small number of ways, killing cells directly or indirectly as previously described.

Every new infection requires different handling. That is why we need a library which grows with each new infection. Of course the result will be one form of killing or another. Please tell me what is incorrect in my summary of your theory.

QUOTE: "While archeologists have long focused on the uniqueness of European markers of behavioral modernity, the new study is part of a growing awareness that many regions of the world saw extraordinary and complex new technologies emerge at the end of the Paleolithic.

DAVID: Again makes my point: Big brain hardly used until learned how to conceptualize more complex ideas. In my view it is the soul who learns to use. The size at the beginning shows the designer anticipates the use, obviously.

Our ancestors all hung around for hundreds of thousands of years with their larger brains and not much advancement. (We called it “stasis”.) It is the dualist’s soul, not the brain that “conceptualizes ideas”. The brain gathers information and IMPLEMENTS the soul’s ideas. In the case of H. sapiens, expansion ceased and complexification took over, and the dualist’s soul learned to use the larger brain by absorbing the information provided and by getting the brain to implement its ideas. How does this come to mean that the pre-sapiens soul couldn’t think up new concepts before the pre-sapiens brain expanded, and how do 280,000 years of stasis prove that God expanded the brain rather than the brain having expanded itself through implementing ideas cooked up by our ancestors’ souls – just as it complexifies itself now through the same process of brain responding to requirements of the soul?