Brain expansion: different theories about rapid expansion (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 19, 2020, 11:00 (1555 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I would remind, restructuring is not overall enlargement which brings lots of neuron networks yet to be restructured usefully as the brain is used in many new ways.

dhw: 1)Restructuring encompasses enlargement, complexification, reshaping, and shrinkage. You are prepared to accept that the last three of these, plus minor enlargements, take place without your God’s involvement. 2) I am proposing that major enlargement could also have taken place without your God’s involvement, though he may have invented the mechanism which directs all the restructurings. I don’t know why you find that so unlikely.

DAVID: (1) does not logically follow to (2). God is certainly involved in (1) producing all the mechanisms that perform. (2) means God is the operative who produced enlargement by some mechanism.

My various theories always allow for the existence of God. All our disagreements concern the possible nature, purposes and methods of that God. You believe that all brain enlargements – just like all species (until you stumbled into your errors theory) - were the result of divine preprogramming or direct design by dabble. I propose that the enlargements took place without divine intervention, by means of a mechanism which your God may have invented. Your response is neatly ambiguous, so I take it that you are now prepared to consider the possibility that just like sapiens’ complexification, reshaping, shrinkage and minor expansion, the major expansions of pre-sapiens brains took place without your God’s direct intervention. (But with the proviso that your God was the inventor of the mechanism that caused the expansions.)

DAVID: I will never accept your intelligent cell theory. God simply made them look intelligent.

dhw: Your refusal to accept that something which looks intelligent and acts intelligently might actually BE intelligent is what I would call bias.

DAVID: It is 50/50 odds on the surface of it. Your bias is showing.

I hope your tongue is having fun in your cheek! The odds are 50/50, but you will never accept the theory. And this apparently means that my bias is showing!