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

by dhw, Monday, May 03, 2021, 12:47 (1298 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: 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. New cells are necessary and are acquired as the brain “tailors itself”

DAVID: The new cells popped up 315,000 years ago, and little used until recently, as in language theoretically 70,000 years ago. I view 'acquired' in your statement, should be 'required'.

No. The new cells are acquired as the brain “tailors itself”, because the existing quantity of cells is not sufficient to meet the new requirement. You simply cannot grasp the process I keep trying to describe: 1) new idea, 2) implementation of new idea requires new cells, 3)new cells continue to perform the function for which they were needed in the first place. Nobody knows what any of the new requirements were for the sapiens brain or for that of our predecessors, but I suppose I’d better repeat the list of possible candidates: bipedalism, new environmental conditions, new ideas, new tools or weapons, clothes, new social structures, use of fire, new ways of acquiring food etc. ALL of these would have required complexification, but if the existing quantity of cells could not do the job, then the number of cells had to be increased. What you call sapiens' “light use” would originally have been “heavy” use, and during the period of stasis the new sized brain continued to perform all its earlier functions plus the new one(s). However, not until 70,000 years ago (your figure) were there any new requirements that necessitated major changes, and it was only then that enhanced complexification took over from expansion and made some cells redundant. We don’t actually know which ones – they may NOT have been the cells that had been newly acquired by sapiens.

dhw: 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”).

DAVID: You don't understand the concept of light use of the first sapiens frontal lobes. How much abstract thought occupied them? Zilch.

You don’t understand the concept of cells RESPONDING to new requirements (as demonstrated in the modern brain). What do you count as “abstract” thought? Designing something that has never existed before has to begin with “abstract” thought (in pre-sapiens as well as in sapiens). If you mean philosophy, how the heck do you know what our predecessors thought? What concrete relics do you expect to find of philosophical thoughts that existed before the inventions of painting and writing?

dhw: 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.

DAVID: With so many excess neurons it could be either/or.

So please stop making definitive statements about your God giving us “excess” cells at the start. What were then new cells could be hard at work today.

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

dhw: 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: Yes, the cells had intelligent instructions as to how to complexify according to new needs.

I don’t know why instructions have to be called “intelligent”, but you are simply using different terms to describe what I have been proposing all along with my theistic version: your God designed the mechanism that enables cells to add to their number (expansion) or to create new connections between themselves (complexification). It is the cells themselves that autonomously register the new requirements and autonomously decide how to respond to them, i.e. your God does not do it for them. Being aware of new requirements and deciding how to meet them requires intelligence, which is what I propose (theistic version) would have been an integral part of your God’s original design of the first cells.