Introducing the brain: why so big? Part two (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 21, 2024, 19:53 (88 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: We only agree upon how God handled it.

dhw: That is the whole point of the discussion. If he exists, he would have given our brains the ABILITY to change themselves in response to new requirements, as opposed to gazing into his crystal ball and preprogramming them 290,000 years in advance.

But that is exactly what God did: provided a huge brain with the ability to complexify 290,000 years in its future!!!

dhw: Your agreement should also open the way to the possibility that the same applies to all of evolution: instead of a 3.8-billion-year-old book of instructions for every speciation, lifestyle, strategy and natural wonder, or countless ad hoc operations and courses on how to do this, that and the other, he might have given all cells the same autonomy as he gave our brain cells.

Brain cells are very especially different types of cells. God designed evolution by Himself, not your weird secondhand design theory.

“De novo”

DAVID: This makes rubbish of the Cambrian Explosion gap being de novo. Those marvelous animals used DNA from former Ediacaran's genomes. Nothing is de novo by your tight definition of evolution.

dhw: First of all, “de novo” creation in the Cambrian remains a theory.

What theory? Isn't the gap real?

dhw: Secondly, what are you claiming here? All DNA consists of biochemicals. You can use the same materials to create any number of new things from the beginning. The question is whether there is a direct line from species to species, or in this case, from brain to brain. From hominids to homos, there is a continuous expansion, through the addition of new cells. Do you or do you not believe that our brains, together with their additional "layers of neurons", evolved from earlier brains?

Sure, we evolved from earlier forms, which did not have five layers of pyramidal cells, a giant new phenotypical change.