New Miscellany 2: birds, chimps & superiority (General)

by dhw, Sunday, May 25, 2025, 11:44 (8 days ago) @ David Turell

Bird migration

DAVID: […] 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?

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

Firstly, do you accept that the above are the only two ways in which your God could have “designed” the preparations? Secondly, I went on to give you a perfectly feasible “natural” answer, though I refuse to exclude God from the original design of the cells that give all life forms enough intelligence to respond autonomously to changing conditions. My answer was:

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Again you are describing advanced preparation de novo!

Where does “de novo” come into it? You simply ignore all the explanations I offer. Read on.

Tibetan altitude adaptations

DAVID: […] Humans 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.

DAVID: Yes.

You have even agreed. There was no sudden overnight change of the bird’s/bear’s/dog’s anatomy – although there should have been if your God popped in to perform his operations. No doubt many birds/bears/dogs would have died when winter came, until the necessary responses took place in a few survivors, and became more and more “established” with each generation. Do you really believe that one autumn day, your God popped in to give birds their “mighty microchondria” de novo, plus a map to guide them to summer 10,000 miles away? Please answer.

Brain folding

Thank you for dropping this subject. It would have been pure repetition if we'd continued.

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.”

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?

DAVID: The sport of gymnastics is one tiny example.

Oh well, why stick to muscular activity? A dog’s sense of smell is at least 10,000 times more powerful than ours, and a cheetah can run at twice our speed, and a camel can go without water for 15 days compared to our three. So does that make dogs, cheetahs and camels superior to us?