New Miscellany 1 & 2: evolution. brain, intelligence, birth (General)

by dhw, Monday, April 14, 2025, 10:53 (4 days ago) @ David Turell

Evolution

DAVID: I use Raup's overall statistics. Not your myopic view of definite lines of descent.

dhw: Please stop trying to persuade us that “lines of descent” mean that we and our food are descended from 99 out of 100 species that had no descendants!

DAVID: Evolution produced 100% of everyone: it has to be 99.9% extinct and 0.1% surviving.

For those of us who believe in evolution, of course it “produced” all life forms apart from the very first, but that does not mean that all life forms were produced for the sole purpose of producing us and our food, that your God is an inefficient designer who specially designed every creature and then had to cull 99 out of 100 species because they were irrelevant to his purpose, or that every creature that ever existed was an ancestor of the species that exist today. (696 out of 700 species of dinosaur left no descendants living today. Remember?) Why do you cling to these absurdities?

DAVID: (taken from Part 2): I have to follow Adler’s instructions.

I suspect that Adler would turn in his grave if he heard you accusing him of such absurdities.

DAVID: I don't know His [God’s] reasoning.

dhw: If he wanted a free-for-all (as under “theodicy”), then he would have designed the mechanisms whereby organisms produce their own means of survival (adaptations and innovations). Their survival or extinction would then depend solely on their own abilities, and you would not be left floundering with your inexplicable belief(s) ….(as summarized above)

DAVID: The biochemical design of life is so complex only a designing mind can conduct proper evolution.

I don’t know what you mean by “proper” evolution. We only know of one and its results. I have no objection to the argument that the biochemistry is so complex that it must have been designed. I only object to your assumption that the designer must be an inefficient, incompetent blunderer, although it is perfectly feasible that he could have designed a mechanism that produced the free-for-all which even you have acknowledged as an explanation for theodicy. You can even have him intervening if you like, experimenting, getting new ideas – all these theories would free him from the burden of your ridicule. But no, you won’t budge.

The human brain

DAVID: […] The large new brain added much more than was currently needed.

dhw: Much more WHAT? The size (= number of cells) remained the same! The brain did not/could not expand any more. And so the capacity for COMPLEXIFICATION increased. And complexification only occurs when there are new tasks to perform. It does not complexify IN ANTICIPATION of conditions that do not yet exist!

DAVID: 315,000 years ago the sapiens brain arrived. It was designed by God for future use.

Whether it was designed by God or not, of course it was for future use! The same applies to every adaptation/innovation you can think of! But every adaptation/innovation would have been triggered by a new requirement of some kind. None would have come into existence through events that could only be known by gazing into a crystal ball!

Cellular intelligence

dhw: The theory is that single cells are intelligent, and so they must have the equivalent of a brain, which enables them to process information, pass it on to other cells through communication, take decisions, and give instructions. You have accepted the autonomous intelligence of single cells in the form of bacteria, but for some reason you think that when single cells form communities (i.e. pool their intelligence), they are helpless unless your God gives them instructions to be nice to us or to murder us.

DAVID: Cells in multicellular organisms cooperate in ways that add up to the organism's total functionality. The cells are complete only when working with each other.

Of course there is cooperation within a community – that is one of the hallmarks of intelligence! Whereas single-celled organisms are complete in themselves: their intelligence also provides them with “total functionality”. Thank you for supporting the case for cellular intelligence.

Evolving a bipedal birth canal

DAVID: how female pelvic size adjusted to increasing fetal head size is amazing and suggests a designer at work.

dhw: You don’t need me to tell you that the poor design of the female pelvis is one of the arguments used by atheists! The demands made by bipedalism and by the increased size of the fetal head are regarded as reasons why human childbirth is such a difficult and dangerous process, whereas most other animals manage far more easily. Another example of your God’s inefficiency and incompetence, which you are always so keen to stress? Or perhaps the problem has proved too difficult for the limited intelligence of the respective cell communities to solve?

DAVID: Obstitritians help.

Obstetricians, as well as being difficult to spell, would not be necessary if the design wasn’t so faulty.