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

by dhw, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, 12:46 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

Evolution

DAVID: It has to be 99.9% extinct and 0.1% surviving. There is no other way to 100%. I prefer an overall view. You can stick to your precise history of lines.

There is no reason at all why an omnipotent, omniscient God should not have created the biblical version if that was what he wanted. There is no “has to be”. We are both dealing with the same statistic, and your explanation of evolution is that your omnipotent, omniscient God is messy, cumbersome and inefficient, and we and our food are descended from the 99.9% of unnecessary designs, although you agree that they had no descendants. You can’t even think of any reason for such contradictory nonsense (DAVID: I don't know His [God’s] reasoning”) but you are determined to stick to it.

The human brain

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

dhw: 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!

DAVID: God has His crystal ball!!

Let us assume your God exists, and let us imagine that he popped in one day to insert the extra cells into a group of hominid brains. You have agreed that these cells would have been used right from the start and would not have hung around doing nothing for three thousand years, so they must have been inserted to meet some new requirement at the time. Do you, then, think he inserted the cells specifically in order that, for instance, we should be able to send a rocket to Mars 3000 years later, or do you think he left it to us humans to use the new cells and the existing method of complexification to respond to all unknown future requirements/opportunities/concepts etc. as and when they arose?

Cellular intelligence

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Only when working together cooperatively, each specialized cell doing its prescribed job.

It is precisely the ability of cells to cooperate, communicate, take decisions, sometimes even change their “specialization” according to each new situation, that denotes intelligence. You have already accepted bacterial intelligence, so thank you again for supporting the theory for cells in general.

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! […]

DAVID: Obstetricians help.

dhw: Obstetricians [...] would not be necessary if the design wasn’t so faulty.

DAVID: Faulty? with 8 billion plus of us on Earth it must be working effectively.

One moment you are praising your God for his amazing design, the next moment you thank obstetricians for helping to cope with the faults in the design, and the next moment you are praising God for the faulty design which requires the help of obstetricians to make it work effectively or efficiently.

New deep soil microbes

QUOTE: "'I believe this occurred because the deep soil is such a different environment, and this group of organisms has evolved over a long period of time to adapt to this impoverished soil environment," Tiedje added.

DAVID: life everywhere on Earth contributes to the ecological balance. It grows with purpose. We will see more discoveries like this one.

I’m sure we will, and each one will demonstrate the ability of even microbes to survive by adapting themselves to different environments. Every living form has a role in an ecological system, and every extinct form had a role in its own ecological system, but that does not mean every ecological system extant and extinct was specially created solely for the use of us humans.

Logical ordering of bacterial genes

QUOTE: The results really surprised us. They provide an excellent explanation of an important aspect of bacterial evolution: The right genomic positioning gave the bacteria existing today an advantage over their rivals.'"

DAVID: if this developed by natural trial and error would bacteria every survive? Why are we surprised by finding logical designs in every research into how life works?

The quote shows precisely how evolution works through changes that improve organisms’ chances of survival. In the case of bacteria, the changes are limited to adaptations; in multi-celled organisms, the communities are able to create the innovations that lead to new species. It is precisely through “trial and error” that some organisms survive and some go extinct. Only an omniscient, omnipotent God would know how to create the perfect survivor “de novo”, but apparently yours didn’t, which is why your theories are such a mass of contradictions.