More Miscellany: Bechly reappears (General)

by dhw, Sunday, May 12, 2024, 09:08 (172 days ago) @ David Turell

Snakes and fungi

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

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

I don’t know of any prey that does not make an effort to avoid being gobbled up by a predator. Simply running away is one strategy, but I don’t believe the prey “conceptualizes” before it runs. Our friend the first play-dead opossum may have realized running would be no help, may have once seen a predator sniff a dead body and walk away, and thought to itself: “Worth a try.” But it all boils down to the fact that I think our fellow creatures are more intelligent than you believe, and don’t require a divine dabble or a 3.8-billion-year-old set of instructions to try and protect themselves whenever there’s a threat to their survival.

Origin of sympathetic nervous system

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.

DAVID: 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.

On the other thread: “I won’t moan about your humanized God you have aptly described”, and here you are, moaning again and ignoring all your own humanizing. So true theologians all agree that your God’s one and only purpose was to create us and our food, and his method was messy, cumbersome and inefficient; that he is to blame for the slaughter of 50 million people by the flu bug which he designed and could not control, but we shouldn’t be afraid of his bugs because they also do us good; that he did not want a Garden of Eden but allowed/created evil because otherwise he and we would have been bored; that he doesn’t want to be worshipped or recognized because that would make him self-interested; that he is/isn’t interested in his creations; and that although he probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours, he is certainly not human in any sense. Who’s laughing?

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.

DAVID: 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?

No, I can’t. And I’m not convinced that anyone can, since so many “experts” disagree. But the melting of the ice caps, the destruction of forests, the loss of species with their habitats, the ravages of pollution etc. are all real, and there are also powerful vested interests in maintaining the status quo. You are right, I can’t make an informed choice, and I don’t know to what extent the chaos is purely the result of climate change, but there is enough human-made destruction going on all around us for me to wish it could be stopped.

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.

I ask you a straightforward question, and your answer is to present Bechly’s interpretation of the history of human evolution. What response do you expect from me? As far as I know, the orthodox view is that we are most likely descended from heidelbergiensis, we could have interbred with earlier homos like Neanderthals and Denisovans, and there are lots of similarities between their brains and ours. There are even similarities between chimp brains and ours. So do you think sapiens’ brain was created “de novo” or that it evolved from earlier brains that were less complex? Please answer.