Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 27, 2021, 11:50 (1097 days ago) @ David Turell

Homo luzonensis
DAVID: You are so blind to your humanizing of God, you fully misinterpret my view of a non-human God.

dhw: As I have shown, your God is as humanized as my various alternatives, and in any case that does not provide a logical explanation of the theory bolded above. What have I misinterpreted?

DAVID: My God is allegorical, so any statement about His personal attributes means similar to at the human level. His personality, in my concept of it, is diametrically opposite yours.

1) What did I misinterpret in your theory that your God only wanted sapiens and therefore designed thousands of life forms etc. that had no connection with sapiens? 2) If your God is allegorical, it means he is a symbol. What does he symbolize? 3) Do please tell us which of your concepts of his personality are opposite to mine, but please don't use negatives.

Some ant brains shrink and grow
dhw: Please tell us why he had to specially design this particular ant brain and also our new friend azhdarchid pterosaur in order to specially design H. sapiens and our food supply.

DAVID: All part of the giant ecosystem of food chains, since all animals must eat.

How does this come to mean that they plus 99% of extinct organisms are/were “part of the goal of evolving [= specially designing] humans”? “All animals must eat” does not provide a connection between ourselves and all life forms that ever existed and ate.

Carbon cycle bacterial contribution
DAVID: I think all part of God's plan for the current Earth with full civilization. […]

dhw: Do you believe that your God foresaw the current and future disasters being caused by our “full civilization” and exacerbated by the bacteria he deliberately designed to increase the amount of carbon in the air?

DAVID: But He knew He had to create a warm Earth compared to the rest of the universe, proven by the fact we are really warm. He knew we would develop a giant population, since we are/were so superior and that necessarily would increase CO2.

Since you believe he is always in control, do you think he deliberately created these bacteria to exacerbate the damage he knew we would cause to our planet?

DAVID: Temperature on Earth has many interlocking systems to influence it, including sun spot activity, which currently is very low so current whole Earth Temps are not really rising.

Are you saying that “global warming” is not happening, the icebergs are not melting, and our governments and large numbers of our scientists are following a false trail?

Introducing the brain: all human brains don't react the same
DAVID: Our plastic brain allows us to not be cutout copies of each other.

dhw: No doubt the same applies to many of our fellow creatures. Why single out humans?

DAVID: Don't have to. Our horses are all different in personality.

So why single out humans?

DAVID: I haven't. The article was a human example. This is another example of how you try to reduce our human exceptionalism, as it certainly upsets Darwin's theory, making us unexpected by it.

Please make up your mind. You have just agreed that we are not exceptional in being individually different, and now you want to plug exceptionalism! But yes, intellectually we are indeed exceptional. This does not upset Darwin’s theory in the least, since you also believe in common descent. Unexpected by whom? Were you there at the beginning? If so, when you first saw bacteria, did you say to yourself: “Hey, I expect dinosaurs and elephants and ants and eagles and sharks”?

How viruses might fit in.
dhw: […] perhaps you might consider the possibility that he designed them and bacteria, and then left them to create the great free-for-all that led to the vast diversity of life forms past and present, the latest of which is H. sapiens.

DAVID: My usual objection to free-for-all as if God gave up control.

Your usual “humanizing” of God as a control freak.

DAVID: There you go again: Humans are not just diversity but an unexpected Darwinist result purposely created by god.

Answered above.

Genes driving towards sapiens
QUOTE: "It's an important conceptual step from just the sequence—no tissue, no cells—to biological information and will enable many future studies.'" (DAVID's bold)

DAVID: In my bold is that nasty word 'information'.

I have no problem with the word “information” until it is used to obfuscate, as in absurd statements like ”Information is the source of life”.

DAVID: […] The major finding fits what we already knew from archaeology, modern sapiens evolution was on a fast unnatural evolutionary drive. God may have inserted a fast-driving coded process or may have pushed it Himself.

The “fast-driving coded process” of complexification (with minor expansion) in modern sapiens – which you have agreed works autonomously – is what I call cellular intelligence. What else could it be if it works autonomously?

Yawning has a real meaning

QUOTE: “…animals with bigger brains tend to yawn longer."

DAVID: Interesting take. I still think I do it when sleepy.

I was thinking of applying…yawn…for yet another grant…yawn…to study the philosophical and…yawn…biological and social implications of…zzzzzzzz.