More "miscellany" PART TWO (General)

by David Turell @, Friday, December 09, 2022, 18:33 (476 days ago) @ dhw

PART TWO

Pigeon brains

QUOTES: "Scientists once thought bigger brains made smarter animals. But birds fly in the face of that logic: with a brain smaller than a walnut, they can develop sophisticated tools and remember where they hid food."

The authors speculate that complex cognitive needs such as song and flight could have pushed the evolution of more efficient brain cells. (my color)

Birds may have evolved this trait simply to work with their limited energy supply (David’s bolds)

DAVID: the bolds are Darwinian guesses, as usual. When birds first arrived, they may or may not perform all the activities they do today as noted above: "complex cognitive needs such as song and flight". Did a chance process design this? I doubt it.

dhw: The article doesn’t mention chance. Your bolds simply support the theory that changes to the brain are the result of implementing “cognitive needs” – in much the same way as the brains of illiterate women, taxi drivers and musicians change in accordance with the implementation of their respective needs. The very fact that birds can develop sophisticated tools also lends support to the idea that our fellow creatures have their own autonomous intelligence, but I suppose you will tell us that God gives them instructions.

DAVID: Still blind to Darwin-speak. The red portion asks for evolution pushed by activity, chance mutations required. The activity you use as a comparison to the article is brain plasticity, not evolution. God gave them those brains with instructions.

dhw: The article does not mention chance mutations! Those would precede the ability to sing and fly, but the article says that the need to sing and fly is what pushed the evolution of the brain cells. First the need, and then the changes, as I have explained above. Of course brain plasticity is required if new needs call for changes.

Still accepting Darwin-speak. For each need there naturally appears a solution


Diversity saved mammals

QUOTE: "The team found that dinosaurs present in North America 66 million years ago more or less resembled those of 18 million years earlier and represented a form of ecological stability. Mammals, meanwhile, persistently pushed the envelope of adaptation, evolving into a vast array of climbing, gliding, swimming, burrowing and other forms during this period.

DAVID: my view is God knows everything. He knew about the coming of Chixculub asteroid and pushed the advancing speciation of mammals.

dhw: But if God knew everything in advance, and all he wanted to design was life forms that would lead to us and our food, why did he bother to design all the dead-end dinosaurs (only birds survived) in the first place? You seem to support Raup, who thought non-survival was just bad luck. Judging by the article, mammals survived because many of them adapted to different environments. The greater the diversity, the greater the chance of at least some species surviving and flourishing. And if your God didn’t even plan Chixculub, then he was also dependent on luck changing the environment to suit his purposes (and to get rid of all his wrong choices.) The idea that he had gazed into his crystal ball and seen Chixculub coming again makes a mockery of his decision to design the dinosaurs in the first place. Or do you mean he didn’t know about Chixculub until after he’d designed them?

Same comment: with God in charge evolution is full of errors, due to His bad judgement. Evolution with purpose is just wrongly conducted.


Denisovans

QUOTE: "Such research shows why studying diverse groups can help reveal how humans adjusted to new environments and can “highlight how human diversity is important for adaptation….,” (David’s bold)

DAVID: each group of 'homos' in the past were diverse. The bold supports my thought that God created this diversity to mold the eventual human immunity system to make it broader. WE know Neandertal genes in our DNA support immune activity

dhw: The idea that diversity improves chances of survival seems to be common to this and the mammal thread, and it makes sense. Ten "experiments" have a better chance of success than one. But again there is the nagging question of why an all-powerful God, who seems to know everything, should have to specially design ten species when he only wanted to design one. And you reject experiments of any kind, although you insist that advances can only come from failed experiments.

Covered by noting in your analysis, evolution, run by a God with purpose. suddenly is filled with errors. God did the whole thing wrong, in your judgement.


Cells move by electric charges

DAVID: it appears that these are automatic processes to more (move?) toward a stimulus.

dhw: How cells move is an automatic process. How they know where and when to move, and what decisions motivate their movements and eventually their responses, is always the issue. Hence your theory of divine instructions and Shapiro’s theory of cellular intelligence.

Single cells have sensory capacities. They are programed to know what they should respond to.


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