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

by dhw, Sunday, April 25, 2021, 09:14 (1090 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.

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

DAVID: 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.

I have not wished it away. That is what we call shrinkage, and I have explained it over and over again: when enhanced complexification took over from expansion, it proved so efficient that certain previously essential cells became redundant. Please stop ignoring my arguments.

dhw: My proposal is that they [the new cells] were NEEDED to fulfil a new requirement.

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

A crucial breakthrough. Your recently coined term “light use” is simply another way of describing stasis, when there are no new requirements and so the new cells perform the function that brought them into existence, and all the cells cope with current requirements through complexification until a major new requirement leads to further expansion. But this didn’t or couldn’t happen 2500 years after the last expansion, and enhanced complexification took over (resulting as above in shrinkage). What do you disagree with?

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

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

I don’t know it as fact, any more than you know it as fact that your God popped in and performed a brain operation on all the sleeping hominins and homos to give them cells they didn’t need at the time. All we know is that the brain (apart from the hippocampus) stopped expanding. I have suggested a logical reason. Neanderthal’s anatomy was different from ours, and maybe ours has advantages over theirs.

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.

dhw: […] 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. […] 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: I'll stay with my personal theology. God speciates, and you reject it. No changes.

We are talking about our ancestors. Do you believe your God gave them the autonomous ability to invent new tools etc., as above, or do you think he programmed or taught them how to do it and only stopped programming or teaching when he designed sapiens? If they had the same autonomous power, then they already had the same mechanisms as ours, and we neither complexify nor expand IN ANTICIPATION of new requirements. Both processes come into operation IN RESPONSE to new 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.

DAVID: For the obvious reasons I've presented.

Agreed. All expansions and complexifications must have reasons, as we know from the modern brain. So why would earlier brains NOT have complexified AND expanded in response to new requirements, as the modern brain does?

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”

DAVID: 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.

In brief, you cannot find a single flaw in my proposal, but instead of explicitly accepting that God could have supplied the mechanism which gave the brains of our ancestors as well as ourselves the autonomous ability to complexify AND expand, you hide behind a massive generalization about species.