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

by dhw, Sunday, May 02, 2021, 12:07 (1299 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Yes, we differ. I view the neurons as a planned excess, from God.

dhw: And yet you go on to tell us the vital function they performed:

DAVID: I've previously explained God's planned excess cells allowed us free-willed humans to tailor our new big brain as we wished in the process of complexification as abstractions and other knowledge developed.

dhw: How can they have been “excess” if they helped to give us the autonomous ability to work out our own ideas?

DAVID: The excess cells are part of a tool supply for our brain to complexify itself tailored to our new needs.

You have repeated the core of my theory, except that once more you drag in "excess". The new cells do indeed “tailor” the brain to enable it to fulfil our new needs. Simple example: hunter has new idea: kill with weapon that can be thrown from a distance. New cells are necessary and are acquired as the brain “tailors itself” by designing, manufacturing and using new weapon. (The modern equivalent is the illiterate women’s brains “tailoring” themselves by complexification as the women learn to read.) All new cells will obviously enhance the range of complexification.

DAVID: The mechanism picked and chose among the available cells to set up the five layer network in our frontal lobes. We do not know how certain neurons were picked and networked and others discarded. We don't know if the discarded played any active role in the process.

All of which is irrelevant to the question of whether the new cells were essential in the first place, and we don’t even know if it was the new cells that were discarded.

DAVID: The way the excess helped is it allowed for precise tailoring of needed networks by the complexification process. It is obvious the remaining neurons played an active role in the process, and more than likely the excess cells were mainly passive. So much for your distorted view of what I theorize.

As above, if the new cells allowed the brain to meet the new requirement(s), they can't have been "excess", and they would have continued to perform the same essential function. I don’t know why you think new cells that continue to perform the function which made them necessary in the first place should suddenly stop functioning (“mainly passive”). It seems to me more than likely that the new cells added to our capacity for design, new thoughts, new ideas, and it could just as easily be the new cells that remained and some of the existing cells that proved to be redundant. So much for your distorted view of my theory. Nothing you have written above has the remotest connection to your own theory, which is that your God performed an operation on a group of Moroccans to insert cells which they did not need at the time (excess), were meant to prepare them for future use, but ultimately proved unnecessary.

DAVID: We cannot compare with past fossils, but our frontal lobe setup is nothing like the apes.

Relevance?

dhw: […] you have agreed that the hippocampus of modern sapiens expands autonomously, by which I mean your God does not perform operations or give new instructions to the modern hippocampus. […]

DAVID: The modern hippocampus follows God's onboard implanted instructions to handle the need to memorize, for example, new abstract ideas as they appear.

dhw: Since you agree that the modern brain works autonomously (“free-willed”), what you call “God’s onboard implanted instructions” can only comprise the mechanism which enables the hippocampus to memorize autonomously and the cerebral cortex to come up with its new ideas. What else could this mechanism be, other than the intelligence of the cells? Or do you really believe your God has given instructions for every idea sapiens has ever come up with, and has installed a programme instructing the hippocampus which ones to memorize?

DAVID: We use our brains without God's current help, because of the way He set it up for us. What are you smoking?

And what is the way he set it up for us, if it is not by endowing the cells with the intelligence to do their own thinking? I don’t smoke.

DAVID: Autonomous brain complexification is because the brain follows God's implanted genetic instructions exactly.

What do the “implanted genetic instructions” consist of? Please tell us what you think your God's instructions tell the autonomous brain to do.