Human evolution; savannah theory fading (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 20, 2022, 08:37 (855 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your approach to evolution is to find any argument to avoid a designer God who plans organisms for their future events as below:

dhw: I’m challenging the argument that although we know organisms adapt IN RESPONSE to changing conditions, the innovations that resulted in speciation were put in place in order to meet future requirements that did not yet exist.

DAVID: I know. Designers always design for future use.

dhw: For someone who tells us ad nauseam that God does not think like us, it’s amazing how you can pick on a form of design that no human has ever succeeded in emulating, and insist that since humans design in a certain way, God must do the same. I am haunted by the vision of your prewhales flapping their flippers on a vast stretch of dry land, waiting to find out what they were supposed to do with them. On the other hand, I have no problem accepting the theory that when our ancestors first thought of inventing a weapon which would kill their prey from a safe distance, the design, making and use of the spear would have required additional cells to those they already had, and of course these (and the spear) would then have been used in the future. In other words, it makes perfect sense to me that just as the brain complexifies in response to new requirements, in earlier times it would have expanded for the same reason.

DAVID: I think our brain acts like those in the past. Habilis and erectus had plenty of neurons to think and plan with to allow for the built-in complexification to work. All by God's designs.

I agree that our brains act like those in the past, except that when their brains’ capacity for complexification proved inadequate for new requirements, they expanded, whereas in our case, the new requirements were dealt with by enhanced complexification. I’m delighted to see that in this response you have dropped the notion that your God kept operating on various life forms in order to provide flippers or additional brain cells BEFORE they were required. […]

DAVID: All you are doing is supporting agnosticism which is your right. See the other thread to try to comprehend how I think about God in vast contrast to your method.

dhw: My proposal has nothing whatsoever to do with my agnosticism, since it allows for the existence of your God as the designer of the mechanisms. The other thread presents us with a God who believes he should/has to create countless forms that have no connection with the only form he wants to create. And yet you often call the God of my logical alternative versions “weak” and “bumbling”!

DAVID: You seem incapable of realizing how human you envision God to be.

In each of my theories I propose a particular theistic approach to evolution in order to explain the facts: experimentation, learning and getting new ideas as he goes along, deliberately creating a free-for-all as being more interesting than a puppet show (though always with the option of dabbling). I don’t see these “human” approaches as being any more “human” than your own belief that God enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, or – as you have now told us – that he wants us to think about him, recognize him, and ask questions.

dhw: Please explain why you think your God gave us extra cells which turned out to be redundant. Since you have ignored my explanation of shrinkage, let me repeat it: the extra cells were needed at the time to perform a new function, but as further expansion might have caused problems, complexification later took over and was so efficient that some existing cells were no longer needed. Please explain why you find this theory unacceptable.

DAVID: To explain again: We came with extra neurons in our brain so we could use our brain as we wished which gave us free will. The loss of superfluous neurons had nothing to do with losing free will with the remaining cells fully adequate to allow us to think freely.

So your new theory is that our extra neurons gave us free will – i.e. all our ancestors were automatons! Why, then, did these additional cells make our brain “oversized”? Clearly these new cells would have been of crucial importance to us! Hardly an explanation of shrinkage, is it? And still you refuse to explain why you find my theory unacceptable.