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

by dhw, Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 11:47 (1346 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I agree that past brains would have had the same programme for AUTONOMOUS complexification. And so why could your God not have designed the same mechanism to enable cells to expand as well as complexify through the autonomous process of “handling new uses”?

DAVID: You are backwards. In our brain almost all neurons are present from the beginning. Complexification involves increasing axon networking, not neurons. Only the hippocampus adds neurons.

dhw: You have misread my post. PAST brains would have had the same mechanism for autonomous complexification, and so I am proposing that the same mechanism would have been used to expand PAST brains when their capacity for complexification could not meet PAST requirements.

DAVID: Not misread. The bolded is dead wrong as stated above.

I was agreeing with your statement: “Yes, God programmed our neurons to complexify in our big brain as necessary to handle new uses. And I think past brains had the same program.[/b]” (I say AUTONOMOUS because if complexification can handle new uses, it doesn't need God to keep popping in with instructions for each new use.) How can it be dead right on Sunday and dead wrong on Monday?

DAVID: Of course a new weapon at a time of few useful weapons would 'look' big. To do it our new huge brain was barely used, the point you dance around: why so big if hardly used to full capacity.

dhw: It wasn’t our new huge brain that invented the spear! You are completely missing the point.

DAVID: My point is the tiny advances among early hominins did not require massive brain use.

Your point has always been that your God expanded all earlier brains in anticipation of new uses. Are you now saying the new uses were too tiny to require your God’s successive brain operations? Then why did he bother to expand early brains?

dhw: It is you who “dance” round the problem [stasis], because you cannot tell us why your God would have expanded the brain if it was not going to be required for another 300,000 years. Your only theory is that we had to learn to use it, although how you can learn to use something and yet produce nothing is beyond my understanding.

DAVID: My statement that a designing God anticipate future use of the brain answers the question. Stasis is your problem not mine. Why does a brain naturally way over-expand? You have no natural answer, which why you scream about my bringing up natural causes in recent posts.

Your statement does not explain anything! Why operate on the brain 300,000 years before any change is needed? And why do you harp on about overexpansion? Nobody knows why any stage of the brain expanded to its past or present sizes, but I gave you a list of possible causes. Once the sapiens brain had met its unknown new requirement, there were no more new requirements for 300,000 years. But then the brain did not expand. Instead it complexified, and complexification was so efficient that some of the cells required 315,000 years ago were no longer needed (= shrinkage). Now please tell us why you think your God overexpanded our brain 300,000 years before any change was needed, apart from hhis metaphorically gazing into his crystal ball.

SURVIVAL

dhw: In your theory, God is the driving force who designs all the innovations, and the purpose of the innovations is to improve organisms’ chances of survival in changing environments. And so when you wrote “survival never drives evolution”, you only meant that God designs all the innovations, the purpose of which is survival. Survival as the purpose of evolutionary innovation is therefore exactly the same as in Darwin’s theory.

DAVID: Complete opposite: Difference in driving force is the issue you miss. God drives evolution, guarantees survival while Darwin says the need for survival drives evolution.

Nothing “guarantees” survival, since 99% of species have died out. You are once again conflating “life” with living organisms. Innovations take place in living organisms, not so that life can go on in no matter what form. If your God’s purpose in replacing pre-whales’ legs with flippers was to improve their chances of surviving in water, then the purpose of the evolutionary innovation was survival, which is precisely what Darwin argues. We are having a non-argument here. We can agree that if God exists, he is the driving force behind evolution (whether he designed every species or gave organisms free rein), and the purpose of all the adaptations and innovations was to improve the organism’s chance of survival. The latter is Darwin’s theory, and if you’d rather not describe the purpose of something as a “driving force”, then that’s fine with me.