New Miscellany 2: savannah, Cambrian, brain, origins (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 01, 2025, 16:09 (1 day, 16 hours, 38 min. ago) @ dhw

The savannah theory

DAVID: Bipedalism is a result of God's designs, no natural cause needed.

I know that’s your theory: God operated on the pelvises and legs of a group or groups of tree-dwellers and told them to go walkies. What I don’t know is why you think the later migrations of sapiens “dilute” the savannah theory but don’t “dilute” yours.

The Cambrian

DAVID: God, as designer, handled all new environments.

dhw: You have always vacillated over this – especially when it comes to the local (as opposed to global) changes which would have led to so many new species. But this reinforces the illogicality of your theory. He started out with the sole intention of creating us, but deliberately kept designing new organisms in preparation for the environmental changes he deliberately created, although this meant that he was deliberately creating 99.9 out of 100 species which he knew he would have to cull . Divine lunacy. Especially since you believe that our line of evolution actually began “de novo” in the Cambrian, when at last he invented an environment that was suitable for us and our ancestors!

DAVID: Yes, evolution is an illogical method for a God who can create the Cambrian Explosion de novo.

But in spite of your new-found acceptance of the “free-for-all” theory as an answer to the theodicy problem, you cannot even consider it as a possible alternative to your theory that your God is an inefficient and incompetent designer.

The human brain

dhw:. The big brain – as with every earlier expansion – added new cells to cope with new requirements (e.g. perhaps a change of environment, such as trees to savannah), and since then all new requirements have been met by complexification in an ongoing process. There were no complexifications made in anticipation of not yet existing requirements.

DAVID: Agree.

dhw: Although you think he made our big brains in anticipation of future needs, you agree that our big brain was not made in anticipation of future needs, and I suppose that tomorrow you will tell me you agreed because NOT in anticipation actually means in anticipation.

DAVID: Our new brain was so large, only complexification was needed from 315,000 years ago. That is design in anticipation of need.

You agree that the brain became bigger through new cells being needed for new requirements, and since then the new cells have complexified in order to cope with subsequent requirements. Stage 1) Expansion as a response; Stage 2) Complexification as a response. A response to new requirements is not a prophecy of new requirements.

Paranthropus fossil

QUOTE: One thing that was instantly clear was that the fossil – a thighbone, shinbone and part of the hip – belonged to an unusually small hominin. “It’s impressive how small it is compared with the shortest of the short we’ve known about so far,” says Richard Potts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, who wasn’t involved in the analysis.
"Pickering’s team estimates that the hominin […] was probably a young adult female…”

Maybe a daft question, but how can they be sure that the thighbone, shinbone and piece of hip were not those of a little girl?

QUOTE: Thanks to the leg fossil, Pickering says we can now confirm P. robustus did walk on two legs most of the time. This, he says, is “the real revelation of our research”'.

DAVID: it seems there my have been more than one line of descent to finally evolve sapiens. This is a very early hominid.

The more lines of descent there are, the more puzzling it becomes that a God who can create what he wants “de novo” should choose such a roundabout method of NOT designing what he wants. I rather like the proposal you agreed to under “theodicy” – that just as evil was the product of a free-for-all, the same principle might be applied to the manner in which all species of hominin and hominid evolved.