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

by dhw, Tuesday, July 23, 2024, 09:14 (47 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

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

dhw: Thank you for confirming my proposal. All additional cells at all stages of the brain’s history had the ability to complexify at any time, but none would have been added in order to hang around doing nothing except wait to be used. […] 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.

DAVID: No one assumed the extra neurons were totally inert!!!

This is the problem when one is dealing with a schizophrenic. You agreed with me when I wrote that the early cells were able to meet all new demands:
dhw: Thank you. That does not mean they were superfluous for 290,000 years!

DAVID: Of course they were.

If they were superfluous, they were “inert”. But then you went on to agree that they WERE used - “in a minor way”. Another of your self-contradictions which for some reason you think make sense because you are schizophrenic.

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

dhw: So your all-powerful God provided brain cells with the autonomous ABILITY to respond to future requirements, but he could not have done the same for other types of cell. Why not?

DAVID: Neurons are very specialized cells, not equivalent to other cells.

How does that come to mean that other cells which perform different functions cannot have been given the same autonomous ability to complexify and to process and respond to new information. The brain could hardly perform all its functions if it did not cooperate with other cell communities.

“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.

DAVID: What theory? Isn't the gap real?

dhw: Yes, but the proposal that an unknown, eternal, sourceless mind created species “de novo” is just as theoretical as the proposals that the fossil record is incomplete, or that intelligent cells are capable of major jumps if new conditions require or allow them.

DAVID: All theories are theories, never fact.

Correct. So “de novo” creation remains a theory, although the gap is 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?

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

dhw: Thank you. “De novo” means starting afresh from the beginning. But every expansion of our ancestral brains entailed the addition of cells that were not there before, and every evolutionary innovation (= something new) required changes to existing structures.

DAVID: True.

Thank you. We now agree that sapiens brains evolved from earlier brains, as opposed to their having been designed “de novo”.