More "miscellany" PARTS ONE AND TWO (General)

by dhw, Friday, September 30, 2022, 09:02 (546 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your form of God is primarily human in thought.

dhw: What do you mean by “primarily”? Why, for instance, is your belief that he wanted and maintained “full control” not “primarily human in thought”, whereas my alternative theory that he wanted and produced a “free-for-all” is “primarily” human? Why is your certainty that he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations not “primarily human”, whereas the idea that enjoyment and interest might be linked to his purpose in creating life is “primarily human”?

DAVID: Your pattern of thought about God makes Him very human.

Please explain why your belief that God wants full control, enjoys creating, is interested in his creations and is kind, does not make him “very human”.

Human evolution: African climate and evolution

DAVID: The ancient Homos/hominins had brains which equipped them to handle any future environmental change.

dhw: No they didn’t. History shows that the brains of ancient hominins and homos underwent gradual expansion, as new requirements exceeded the existing capacity for complexification.

DAVID: Just study our known brain for how brains work. Arrived 215,000 years ago ready to do all the work we found for it as its future use unfolded.

dhw: You said ancient brains were equipped to handle any future environmental change, and I pointed out that they weren’t, and so you now switch to our sapiens brain! We have discussed this ad nauseam. You believe your God inserted new cells which would only be used thousands of years later, and I propose that the new cells were needed at the time to meet a new requirement. We agree that from then on, no further cells were needed, because complexification took over from expansion.

DAVID: And the obvious point is a brain prepared for present use only, will not handle the plethora of future use. Each homo brain could handle future use, so each new brain was built for future use.

We are going round in circles. Once more: Every evolutionary change/adaptation/ innovation was “built for future use”! But you propose they were all “built” before they were needed, and I propose they were all “built” in response to a new requirement. That includes the history of the brain, which up to and including sapiens expanded when complexification could no longer cope with a particular new requirement, but which in our case subsequently ceased to expand and instead dealt with future requirements by means of enhanced complexification. We agree on the process. Our disagreement is on the cause and timing of each expansion. (You say God dabbled in anticipation of future requirements, and I say brains expanded in response to current requirements.)

Bacteria protect beetle larvae

DAVID: did the Lagria's work this out on their own, or did God help?

dhw: I always wonder what you mean by “help”. 3.8-billion-year-old instructions? Personal tuition? And would we humans be in trouble if there were no Lagrias?

DAVID: They fit their own ecosystem.

dhw: I still don’t know what sort of “help” God could give besides the two I’ve mentioned. Every life form fits its own ecosystem. That does not mean that every ecosystem has been designed specially for the benefit of H. sapiens.

DAVID: What God produced He felt necessary to produce.

Necessary for what? Life forms are “necessary” components of their respective ecosystems. How does that come to mean that every life form and ecosystem is and always was necessary for the production of us and our ecosystems?

Jawed fish

QUOTE: "Thanks to these close relatives, the researchers pieced together how paired fins in the jawless fish evolved in stages to become separate pectoral and pelvic fins in their jawed cousins. Such fins are the precursors of arms and legs in later tetrapods. "

DAVID: irritating gaps get filled, but the general big picture is clear.

dhw: Yes, the irritating gaps get filled, and each new discovery adds to the general big picture of common descent, as the different stages of evolution are revealed. We should therefore not assume that current gaps will never be filled and that God must have produced totally new species without precursors.

DAVID: The Cambrian gap will never be filled, based on current evidence of a time gap of 410,000 years.

As every new discovery teaches us, “current evidence” may be supplanted by new evidence.

The aging brain after 40

QUOTE: “'Older adults tend to show less flexible thinking, such as forming new concepts and abstract thinking…

Ahaaaa! This explains everything! You are in your nineties, and I am in my eighties. There is an eight-year difference, and so on a sliding scale, I calculate that this makes you 10.63% more inflexible than me. Yeah, that figures! (My daughter’s unscientific description of us many years ago does not allow for such subtle distinctions. She simply called us “two stubborn old men”!) :-)


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