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

by David Turell , Saturday, April 24, 2021, 16:09 (1307 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: We have not decided any such thing. You simply continue to ignore all my arguments!

I don't ignore your arguments, I reject them. You cannot wish away the fact that we had more cells when our brain appeared than we have now under much heavier use than was present then.

dhw: My proposal is that they were NEEDED to fulfil a new requirement.

And I've agreed it is possible/reasonable light use of all the initial bigger brain happened.

dhw: but as the brain could not expand any more,

How do you know that as fact? Neanderthals had bigger brain volume.

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.

hw: 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.

I'll stay with my personal theology. God speciates, and you reject it. No changes.

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.

dhw: 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.

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

For the obvious reasons I've presented.

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.

dhw: 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”

I understand your position and have granted the possibility of light use all over the first enlarged brain with cells to be shucked later, as free-willed humans learned to use their new big brain, supplied by God's speciation.