New Miscellany 2: direct design, brain, tools, savannah (General)

by dhw, Monday, March 24, 2025, 09:38 (11 days ago) @ dhw

Direct design versus the intelligent cell

DAVID: I do not see God designing, designing cells. It is secondhand design which is more work than direct design.

dhw: Direct design means that every single mutation leading to every single new species, and every single solution to every single problem, and every lifestyle and every natural wonder must have been designed 3.8 billion years ago or, alternatively, that your God has to pop in on every occasion in order to perform the necessary operations or to give the necessary instructions. Designing intelligent cells to carry out all these tasks independently sounds to me like almost infinitely less work than you impose on your do-it-all-yourself God[/b]!

DAVID: Which is simpler? Telling someone how to do job or directly doing it yourself?

So you would tell the factory owner to sack his 1000 employees, because it’s simpler for him to do it all himself. Your comment completely ignores all the points I have made above.

The human brain

DAVID: I am convinced our very special brain was designed.

dhw: I agree that our brains are special, as is clear from our massively enhanced intelligence, but it also seems reasonable to me that all brains were specially designed, namely by the different cell communities which were responding to new requirements, using their own perhaps God-given forms of intelligence. Or alternatively, do you think your God personally operated on all non-human and pre-sapiens brains as well as on the legs and pelvises of our ancestors? If so, why do you think he chose such a roundabout method of designing the only brains he wanted? No need to answer. You’ve already told us that he’s a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer.

DAVID: I have no idea why He chose His method.

It would be far more accurate to say you have no idea why your God would have chosen the utterly illogical method you have imposed on him.

Origin of stone tools

DAVID: we have a tendency to assume our ancestors were dumb. They may well have invented knapping stone tools after seeing examples in nature or directly invented the process. Now we have both proposals. Animal use of stone tools support the idea that naturaliths were the first step.

This is a comment which I wholeheartedly endorse. Many humans have a tendency to assume that not just our ancestors but also our fellow organisms are dumb. In the great battle for survival, even the smallest organism must have some sort of intelligence to recognize problems and dangers. Over the course of time, most have eventually become extinct, because their intelligence is not equal to the task, but many have survived for hundreds of thousands of years before that happened. Bacteria have survived from the very beginning. Human scepticism has been beautifully summarized by James A. Shapiro as “large organisms chauvinism”. This article deals simply with sapiens chauvinism in relation to our ancestors.

The savannah theory

DAVID: The savannah theory is now unsupported by the new findings but still a logical theory.

dhw: It is “unsupported” by the new findings because the new findings have nothing to do with the question of sapiens’ origin! You have said yourself that no-one knows the origin, so all we can have is unsupported theories, including your own, which attributes the origin to your God performing operations on individual pelvises, legs and possibly brains, though your post above suggests he left brains to design their own evolution until he decided to pop in and do a sapiens special.

DAVID: Lucy became Erectus and Erectus became sapiens is all we know.

Even that is a bit controversial, but in the context of our discussion, thank you for now agreeing that none of the articles have in any way demonstrated the fading of the savannah theory.