More Miscellany: Bechly reappears (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 11, 2024, 19:09 (46 days ago) @ dhw

Snakes and funguses

dhw: All our fellow creatures devise ways of protecting themselves and their young. If they don’t, they won’t survive.

To repeat, the acts require conceptualization recognizing how the predator may react to teh event created. We humans easily understand, but can an opossum? A snake?

Origin of sympathetic nervous system

DAVID: This answers dhw's complaint that God made 99.9% of unnecessary organisms just to throw them away. They were all part of a purposeful development, step-by-step to a goal, or as in evolution steps to many, many goals.

dhw: I don’t know what “many, many goals” you are referring to, since you insist that your God only had one goal (us plus food.) ... Clearly the sympathetic nerve system was not one of the innovations you announce as having been divinely invented “de novo” by your God, i.e. without any predecessors, and the lamprey is still here as one of 0.1% of surviving lines, and not descended from the 99.9% which your God inefficiently “had to” design and cull for reasons known only to himself.

DAVID: You hate God running evolution, the same evolution that supposedly happened with complex designs like our brain. See brain entry.

dhw: Please stop pretending that my opposition to your illogical theory of God’s messy, inefficient handling of evolution means that I hate God running evolution. I hate your silly theory. All my alternatives have your God running evolution in a different way or for a different purpose.

All those purposes are purely humanizing God!!! I hate this silly God of yours. In a theology class you would be laughed out the door. You have no idea how to think about God as true theologians do.

Global warming

dhw: And you assume that the other group of experts has not studied the subject for years, or if they have, they are not as well informed as you.

Get informed about climate theory. before swallowing all the Guardian's alarmism. Can you tell yourself you have enough background to make an informed choice?

One cubic millimetre of brain

QUOTE: "It's just a millimeter on each side – but 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, and 230 millimeters of ultrafine veins are all packed into that microscopic space.

DAVID: see the mind-blowing illustrations in the article, a three-minute adventure. We can never fully understand the connectome. Darwin theory type of evolution cannot create this.

dhw: Absolutely stunning. It’s a pity you have to muddy the waters with your usual sideswipe at Darwin. Of course he knew nothing about these complexities, but his focus is on the development from simple to complex. When discussing the evolution of the eye, he looks back at gradations from the current “perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple", but “how a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated.”. Do you believe that the sapiens brain was created “de novo”, or that it evolved from earlier brains that were less complex? If it’s the latter, then it’s covered by Darwin’s theory of common descent.

Bechly:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/05/fossil-friday-discontinuities-in-the-fossil-record-a-...

"Many people think that our own species is connected to apes by a gradual transitional series of apeman fossils from East and South Africa. However, in reality there is a distinct anatomical gap between the ape-like australopithecines and the first representatives of our own human genus Homo. Hawks et al. (2000) suggested that the genus Homo originated abruptly 2 million years ago with sudden interrelated anatomical changes. They concluded that “In sum, the earliest Homo sapiens remains differ significantly from australopithecines in both size and anatomical details. Insofar as we can tell, the changes were sudden and not gradual... Hawks et al. also emphasized “that no gradual series of changes in earlier australopithecine populations clearly leads to the new species, and no australopithecine species is obviously transitional. This may seem unexpected because for 3 decades habiline species have been interpreted as being just such transitional taxa, linking Australopithecus through the habilines to later Homo species. But with a few exceptions, the known habiline specimens are now recognized to be less than 2 Myr old (Feibel et al. 1989) and therefore are too recent to be transitional forms leading to H. sapiens.”

***

"Middle Stone Age humans evolving in Africa may appear anatomically modern, but did not become cognitively modern until the Later Stone Age/Upper Palaeolithic. Symbolic culture emerged some 50,000 years ago, caused by a genetic mutation that re-wired the brain.” (Knight 2010). There is even strong evidence for a “Sudden Appearance” model for the saltational origin of human cognition and language (Lanyon 2005, 2010). And of course this was later followed by the Neolithic agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. Revolutions clearly are a hallmark of intelligent agency, not of unguided natural mechanisms."

We did not appear gradually.