New Miscellany 2: birds, brains, chimps (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 24, 2025, 18:51 (9 days ago) @ dhw

Bird migration

DAVID: Useless point! Answer how physiological preparation for flight occurs in advance of it?

dhw: You have just said it does, and there are lots of examples of physical changes that our fellow creatures make in preparation for winter. Calling them automatic is hardly an explanation of how they originated. Are you telling us that it must have been your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old instruction book again, or one of his dabbles, without which we humans could not survive?

My answer is God designs the preparations. You have no natural answer.

> QUOTE: […] genetic studies suggest that H. sapiens experienced many major episodes of natural selection."

DAVID: solidifies the point, we are very very adaptable.

dhw: And so are other life forms, including birds. Their advance adaptations clearly occur because their bodies are sensitive to something in the atmosphere which warns them that the time is approaching for them to leave. Most species of bear also prepare their bodies before the onset of winter. And your dog starts growing his winter coat in autumn. Once a successful response to these changes has been found, it is passed on. It’s the same with the next article.

Again you are describing advanced preparation de novo!

Tibetan altitude adaptations

DAVID: This article has a headline that touts evolution happening: "Humans Are Evolving Right in Front of Our Eyes on The Tibetan Plateau". Wrong! They are adapting to severe conditions. Homans have an enormous adaptive ability.

dhw: It’s not just humans that adapt! The cells of all life forms must not only respond intelligently to new conditions, but once their responses are established, the changes will become hereditary and the processes will seem automatic. And those individuals whose cells are best adapted are most likely to survive and pass on their superior changes, which then become the normality.

Yes.

Chimps ‘r’ not us

QUOTE: “This means that the actual difference between human and chimp DNA is 14 times greater than the often-quoted 1 percent statistic.”

DAVID: this study does away with the one-two percent difference widely quoted. Casey Luskin had to dig it out of the original paper. Current prejudice wishes to hide our exceptionism.

dhw: Nobody has ever said that chimps are human. Does anyone really think our brain power is 99% the same as that of chimps? (It is the brain power that makes us so exceptional.) Assuming everyone accepts the new figure, what are we left with? They and we now share 86% DNA. Does it mean we don’t have a common ancestor?

DAVID: It makes us less chimp than people wish to convey. It is not just brain power. Our muscular bodies function very differently.

dhw: What does our less “chimpness” teach us? And what human muscular activities do you think make us superior to our fellow animals?

The sport of gymnastics is one tiny example.