New Miscellany 2: savannah, evolution, brain, intelligence (General)

by dhw, Friday, April 04, 2025, 13:57 (13 hours, 53 minutes ago) @ David Turell

The savannah theory

dhw: Please tell us why the fact that hominids later inhabited all kinds of environments makes your theory of the ORIGIN more logical than mine.

DAVID: My God theory in faith is no better then yours when absolute proof is asked for.

Thank you for agreeing that divine surgery is just as unproven as the savannah theory, and neither is even remotely “diluted” by the fact that hominids migrated later to all kinds of environments. End of discussion, I trust.

The Cambrian and evolution

DAVID: I simply agreed God is inefficient.

dhw: You didn’t “simply agree”. You have manufactured theories which show your God to be inefficient and incompetent. But you refuse to consider even the possibility that he might actually have created precisely what he wanted to create.

DAVID: God did create exactly what He wished to create.

So he created and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species,because he wished to be a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer, and today he has changed from being the efficient creator of a free-for-all to being the incompetent creator of evil which he never intended to create but which he wished to create!

Dhw: Do you honestly think all your fellow believers praise God for his inefficiency and incompetence?

DAVID: My analysis is mine alone.

I’m not surprised. And yet you complain that some of my theories are not "mainstream"!

The human brain

DAVID: Preparation for new requirements anticipates new uses.

dhw: Of course “preparation” would be anticipatory. But you keep agreeing that changes to the brain, whether through complexification or expansion, are responses to new requirements, not preparations for requirements that may not exist for thousands of years.

DAVID: Without the changes 315,000 years ago, mental activity now required could not exist.

That’s like saying if evolution hadn’t followed the course it followed, it would have followed a different course! All we know is that the brain changes IN RESPONSE to new requirements. The final expansion provided us with enough cells to meet the new requirements that arose 315,000 years ago, but also to facilitate subsequent new responses to new requirements through enhanced complexification. That does not mean your God supplied the new cells 315,000 years ago because he had looked into his crystal ball and knew they'd be needed thousands of years later to meet with requirements that did not yet exist. Once more: the brain changes IN RESPONSE to new requirements, not in anticipation of non-existent requirements.

Belief vs non-belief

DAVID: It is not unreasonable to think that atheists think believers are more trustworthy. I thought the article showed that.

Neither you nor the article specified who might feel that believers were more trustworthy. With all the revelations of sexual abuse, corruption and cover-ups, I suspect most atheists would laugh at the idea that believers were to be trusted more than non-believers.

Cellular intelligence

dhw: I have explained why your statement that “at all times you think cells can think” is a complete distortion of what I think. Now you simply revert to your belief that although you agreed a couple of days ago that cells autonomously process information, communicate, make decisions and issue instructions, this means they do not autonomously process information etc. etc.

DAVID: See today's entry on bacterial action with ameba's at a molecular level, no thought involved.

Bacterial immunity

QUOTE: However, little is known about the molecular interplay between bacteria and predators, particularly how bacteria can sense and kill their microbial predators. We show how the ubiquitous bacterium Pseudomonas syringae detects and kills the social amoeba Polysphondylium pallidum.

DAVID: […] Bacteria, sensing the ameba, release a molecule the ameba degrades into a form that the bacteria can then use to create an amebicide. How such a system developed in which the ameba helps in its own demise is very surprising. I thought the whole idea was survival is key to all actions. This is the reverse. This study also demonstrates my point of view. All molecular activity, no thought involved.

You seem to think the amoeba is deliberately helping the bacterium to kill it! You have acknowledged again and again that bacteria work out their own means of survival (they have the “freedom of action or free will” to create evil), and this article simply explains how they do it. Our own efforts to kill bacteria also entail molecular activity, but you think ours is directed by our intelligence and theirs is not, although you agree that it is.

Fish use tools

DAVID: Yes, bacteria edit DNA in limited ways. They don't modify into new species.

dhw: Innovation demands a different level of intelligence, but an organism which can outwit humans as it finds ways of countering our attempts to kill it must have a form of autonomous intelligence, as you have acknowledged under “theodicy”. After all, your form of God would hardly have given it instructions to murder us, would he?

DAVID: I doubt it.

And the more you doubt it, the more obvious it should be to you that bacteria have the autonomous intelligence to work out their own ways of survival.