Evolution: more genomic evidence of pre-planning (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, February 14, 2021, 15:41 (1376 days ago) @ David Turell

Transferred from the Neanderthal post, since you tried to use that as evidence of your God changing human brains in anticipation of new requirements.

DAVID: …the article's inference is our brains were very different 315,000 years ago when we appeared, with those 61 genes, and long before our current productions. Sure looks like an anticipated-usage preparation.
Quote: …. [the team] first compared the genomes of modern humans with those of Neanderthals and Denisovans—another archaic human—reconstructed from excavated bones. They found 61 genes for which modern humans all had one version and the archaic humans had another.

Again this is confusing. When did the 61 different genes come into existence? Did the team examine the brain of sapiens fossils from the time of co-existence or from today? It sounds as if it’s from today, in which case we have no idea exactly when the new genes appeared. In any case, we have been over this a thousand times: nobody knows how brain changes occurred in the past. But we agreed that there was a long period of stasis between the arrival of the sapiens brain and the burst of activity that produced our current advanced civilization. This is consistent with the even longer periods of stasis that occurred between earlier stages of brain change. I have proposed that each brain change is the result of some new activity or requirement (as proven by changes that take place in the modern brain), whereas you propose your God stepped in and performed operations on groups of hominins and homos before they engaged in new activities. I really don’t know why we have to go over all this again.

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DAVID: My bold of a scientist's 'waiting to happen" quote tells the story. The existing DNA allowed the advances to happen. You have not answered the real issue, how did it happen that a mechanism for advance was present undoubtedly in the first bacteria? […] Designer is implied, strongly.

dhw: Thank you for at last agreeing that the MECHANISM for change was already present in the first DNA. No need for millions of computer programmes or divine dabbling. How often do you want me to repeat that nobody knows the origin of life or of this mechanism, but God is one possibility, chance is another, and a form of panpsychism is another, but I find all three first causes equally difficult to believe in.

DAVID: Poised on the picket fence as usual.

Yes of course. Meanwhile, you are glossing over a truly momentous development in your thinking: that “the mechanism for advance was present undoubtedly in the first bacteria”. No need for a 3.8-billion-year programme for every individual advance, and no need for your God to perform millions of operations.