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

by dhw, Tuesday, March 02, 2021, 13:00 (1144 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The issue is your insistence that your God had to step in and perform operations in anticipation of new requirements, whereas I propose that cells designed their own restructuring and reinforcement (including the frontal cortex) in response to new requirements. That is to say, not "willy-nilly" - in contrast to your theory which has your God expanding brains for no particular reason 280,000+ years before sapiens thinks of something new to do with them.

DAVID: You forgot to mention your fallback point the cells got an intelligence from God to invent the necessary changes. Design requires intellient anticipation of needs.

It is not a fallback point (I am an agnostic), but your response is a good way of avoiding all the points I have raised. In answer to your final remark, I do not believe that adaptation and innovation require gazing into a crystal ball. I believe that organisms adapt and innovate IN RESPONSE to new requirements and not in anticipation of them, just as the human brain is known to RESPOND to new requirements and not to change in anticipation of them.

dhw: […] I find it perfectly feasible that your God could have designed the intelligence which enables cells/cell communities to complexify (as you believe they do) and to add to their number when this is needed (which you refuse even to consider).

DAVID: […] I'll consider the hippocampus for providing new cells, the only place in the brain found to do it !!!

[…] If the hippocampus can produce new cells, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the addition of cells in earlier brains followed the same procedure.

DAVID: And finally there is no survival need for our particular brain, to kill your favorite reason for evolution.

dhw: As we have agreed over and over again, there was no “survival need” for any organism beyond bacteria. But as conditions changed, multicellular communities cooperated not only to survive (adaptation) but also to find new ways of improving their chances of survival (innovation). I have no doubt that the same process applied to the evolving human brain: the earliest humans would also have had survival as the main motive for their adaptations and inventions, and even today there are sapiens whose activities centre mainly on survival.

DAVID: Of course we have to eat to survive, make money to eat, etc. We all have the motive. You are still struggling to save the Darwin concept of survival to cause evolution , while having given it up in your comment about bacteria who have always survived, as God planned.

I have not “given it up”, and the Darwin concept does not need “saving”. You have tried to conflate two forms of “survival”: 1) the continuation of life, for which you claim that the sapiens brain was not “needed”. I have pointed out that no other life form was “needed” for the continuation of life, since bacteria have survived, and so that argument can’t be used to justify your anthropocentrism. 2) I don’t see how you can possibly believe that the motive for adaptations is NOT to enable individual species to survive changes in their living conditions, and by the same token innovations cannot possibly survive if they do not fit in with living conditions. Here my proposal is that they improve chances of survival. Our prime example has always been pre-whale legs turning into flippers, as flippers offer a better chance of survival in the water.

Brain expansion

QUOTE: "According to the researchers, the decrease in the size of game and the need to hunt small, swift animals forced humans to display cunning and boldness—an evolutionary process that demanded increased volume of the human brain and later led to the development of language enabling the exchange of information about where prey could be found. The theory claims that all means served one end: body energy conservation.
[…] In addition to brain volume, evolutionary pressure caused humans to use language, fire and sophisticated tools such as bow and arrow, adapt their arms and shoulders to the tasks of throwing and hurling and their bodies to the prolonged chase, improve their stone tools, domesticate dogs and ultimately also domesticate the game itself and turn to agriculture.'"

DAVID: Note my last bold. ("To date, no unifying explanation has been proposed for the major phenomena in human prehistory." ) There is no explanation why the sapiens brain arrived 315,000 years ago. Note the gap in time: mammoths among others went extinct 20,000 years ago. Totally disconnected Darwin-think. dhw will love it, despite its topsy-turvy mish-mash of thought. Obviously the article reviewers were all Darwinist.

As usual, you think that by using the word “Darwin” you can automatically relieve yourself of the need to discuss the reasoning. We keep agreeing that nobody knows why the brain expanded. I would add “improving methods of survival” to “body energy conservation”, and I don’t think “evolutionary pressure” explains all the improvements that would have required additional brain cells. I would add new ideas and discoveries to the list of influences on human progress. The pre-sapiens brain would have expanded for precisely the same reasons. There is no topsy-turvy mish-mash – only your refusal to follow a perfectly straightforward argument: the brain expanded because it needed additional cells to RESPOND to new requirements.