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

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 02, 2021, 15:34 (1144 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

Forgetting brain stasis. Our huge brain did nothing much for over 300,000 years. It obvoiusly came prepared for the future

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 !!!

dhw: […] 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.

You are confused. The hippocampus memory center is deep in the brain; the cells you want tp appear must rise in the frontal and prefrontal areas, but don't.

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.

dhw: 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.

I make the opposite point. As bacteria have survived through all time of living organisms, why did evolution have to happen?

dhw: 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.

I see a different God motive: securing that life does not disappear, the reverse of your thought. Survival never drives evolution

Brain expansion

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.

dhw: 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.

Exactly the reverse of my view. I follow your argument and fully disagree. God gave us the giant brain in preparation for future use 315,000 years later. Your usual response has been to describe stasis but avoiding discussing its real meaning of foresight in preparation ..