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

by David Turell , Friday, February 19, 2021, 19:00 (1152 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I don’t know how often you want me to repeat the line above: nobody knows the cause of brain expansion. For some reason you restrict yourself to the current brain, and you restrict yourself to artefacts. And stepwise enlargement refers to the different expansions from one species of human to another, not from sapiens to sapiens.

Just note sapiens suddenly had 200 cc more frontal lobe with no existing requirement to use it, based on any new needs for required activities of daily living, in modern terminology.

DAVID: Read the following article about our brain since Luther:
https://nautil.us/issue/96/rewired/martin-luther-rewired-your-brain?mc_cid=12a60281c6&a...
Actually don't bother. It simply describes Protestantism pushing reading for all and how our brains obviously changed by its designed plasticity.

dhw: I did bother, since your caveat illustrates a point that you desperately try to avoid, and which is repeated in the very first line of the article:
QUOTE: Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as you acquired a particular skill.

That line I fully accept as describing built-in plasticity changes.

dhw: Summary of my proposal: every brain change throughout hominin/homo history resulted from the effort to respond to something new: e.g. an idea, a change in conditions, a new discovery. Every expansion has been followed by a period of stasis until the next new requirement appears...Please explain why you find all this impossible to believe.

Simple. You have not explained a huge new brain appears with very little new to do. It is obviously designed for future use.

Behe

dhw: I did not note that at all. I said that adaptation can be ACCOMPANIED by (not result from) loss of genes, and I explained why.

DAVID: The oddity is in that adaptation seems to require loss of information or a rearrangement of information so necessary previously hidden information can appear. Proof: it appears necessary future information is planted beforehand, in anticipation of need, just what you reject.

dhw: My suggestion is that it does not REQUIRE loss of information (I don’t know why you’ve switched from genes to information) but is accompanied by the loss of information/genes that are no longer relevant to the organism’s situation. And you have forgotten the fact that the process is accompanied by NEW genes. (Initially, you even denied that there were any new genes!) NEW genes were not “planted beforehand”!

Genes are removed according to the article, which I have reread.