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

by David Turell , Saturday, April 05, 2025, 20:22 (23 hours, 39 minutes ago) @ dhw

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: Good designers anticipate future use. God has a crystal ball.

dhw: You are the one who keeps calling your God “inefficient” (evolution) and “incompetent” (theodicy), and although you have no choice but to agree that all changes to the brain take place as RESPONSES to new requirements, you insist that our later complexities were all “prepared” thousands of years before they were required.'

A designer designs for future uses.

Cellular intelligence

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

Bacterial immunity

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: NO, it is all automatic step by step a the article shows.

dhw: It shows the steps taken after the new information has been processed, cells have communicated, decisions have been made, and then and only then do other cells obey those that have done the thinking and issued the instructions.

Where does the article show thought processing?

Very early oxygen use

DAVID: as I noted before, oxygen is a dangerous substance and requires antioxidants to control it. This advance required increasing complexity and infers the need for design. Evolution seems to know what is coming next, as if someone is planning its advance. Noted in yesterday's entry: Thursday, April 03, 2025, 20:58

dhw: Evolution doesn’t think or know anything. It is a process. This whole article concerns the way in which bacteria use the conditions in which they find themselves. You keep agreeing that this astonishing adaptability is indicative of autonomous intelligence, but then you deny it. You are fixated on the idea that your God has planned everything in advance – but this does not explain why 99 out of every 100 species had to be specially designed and then culled so that he could produce us, although he could have done so “de novo”.

God does what he wishes at each level of evolution. Let's start with God knows best. What bacteria do looks autonomous but follows automatic rules.

dhw: You agree that we are descended from 0.1% of survivors, but insist that we are also descended from the extinct 99.9% who produced no descendants.

I do not follow your very restricted view of the evolutionary process. Of course our special line ends up with us. That is only one aspect of evolution.

dhw: And you agree that evil may be the product of your God creating a free-for-all, but murderous bacteria are either the result of his incompetency or under his instructions. You don’t seem able to see how all these events and theories are tied together – in your case, messily, cumbersomely, inefficiently and incompetently, whereas if you would only stick to your agreement that life’s history is that of a massive free-for-all (perhaps set in motion by your God), we would have at least one theory that makes sense.

A very limited view. It is a guided process, and looks messy. BUT it miraculously produced us!