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

by dhw, Saturday, April 24, 2021, 11:12 (1307 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: All we have decided is God provided excess cells at the original enlargement of the sapiens brain, and with full use of the brain the excess was discarded by complexification.

We have not decided any such thing. You simply continue to ignore all my arguments! If God exists, firstly I challenge your theory that he performed operations on all the hominins and homos to pop a few extra cells into their brains in anticipation of future requirements. (See below for more details.) Secondly, I challenge your theory that the original enlargement of the sapiens brain provided “excess” cells. My proposal is that they were NEEDED to fulfil a new requirement. Once this was fulfilled, the cells continued to perform the functions that first made them necessary, and they and all the other cells would have continued to complexify until the next major requirement (you reckon it was 250,000 years later) necessitated a substantial change. In the past, that would have been the addition of new cells, but as the brain could not expand any more, enhanced complexification took over. This proved so efficient that certain cells were no longer necessary (= shrinkage).

DAVID: Light use of all neurons at first is certainly reasonable, allowing for free-will humans to use their new brain any way they wished.

What you call light use would have occurred during the period of stasis when there were no major new requirements. I don’t know why you are now harping on free will, as this in itself is a controversial subject. But even if we assume that we have it, our ancestors would also have had it, unless you think that your God had not yet given them the autonomous ability to invent new tools and weapons, adopt new ways of coping with their environment, establishing social practices, making clothes, using fire etc. This is the point I was making above: I do not accept the idea that your God performed operations on them to give them more cells in anticipation of these advances. If we have free will to invent, then so did they.

DAVID: You can't get rid of an obvious excess that was provided initially by God to allow all sorts of future uses invented by humans.

I have got rid of it over and over again, but you refuse to even consider what I write, and you refuse to provide a logical reason for rejecting it. I’ll skip most of the remaining post, which merely repeats vague statements about free will and excessive cells which allow “proper tailoring”, and move to the last exchange:

dhw:. We have now established once and for all that the brain complexifies autonomously in RESPONSE to new requirements (using a mechanism you believe was designed by your God). Bearing in mind that the modern hippocampus actually expands, why then do you assume that in the past, brains were unable to expand autonomously, and did NOT expand in response to new requirements but had to be operated on so your God could give them additional cells in anticipation of unknown future requirements?

DAVID: […] Only the hippocampus must expand as we learn to do new tricks/procedures with our brain and must add memory.

So we know that part of the modern brain can expand autonomously.

DAVID: Older brains were most likely the same with new organisms building upon what was done in the past. Why do you day dream possibilities not based on what we know about brains from today's brain? In my view today's brain's mechanisms mimic what happened in past brains.

Precisely. They would have complexified autonomously, as do our modern brains, and they would have expanded autonomously, as does our modern hippocampus – both processes in RESPONSE to requirements and not in anticipation of them. You’ve finally got the message, though I have no idea why you call it “daydreaming”