The Dodo Problem (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 13:01 (5105 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What drove Australopithicus to Homo habilis to Homo sapiens? Nothing we absolutely know of. Dumb luck? Road apples!!! We can see no such need for such a driven branch of evolution. Re-read my chapter of my book,"Our Hat Size is Too Big for Darwin". Recent research, I have quoted here, tells us the chimps and bonobos did not advance at all. They had just as many 'threats' as our branch. They have been in stasis. But not the road to H. sapiens. Please explain it, if you can!-I find your argument against "dumb luck" totally convincing, here as in your book, and as I keep trying to emphasize, it is one reason why I cannot accept the atheist argument that attributes life, consciousness etc. to chance. In my last post I have tried to make that clear, and have also tried to make it clear that I can't believe in a UI that either came about by chance or has always been around. That is why I'm an agnostic. I can only repeat that my objection to your scenario is that you focus the UI's original mechanism precisely on the deliberate and automatic production of humans, while at the same time it produces by chance a vast array of species that have nothing to do with the production of humans. This does not seem to me a logical piece of planning. -You have asked me to explain why chimps and bonobos have been in stasis, whereas hominids developed into homo sapiens. Let me set my imaginary scene first: God invents his evolutionary mechanism. He says either 1) let's see what it comes up with (= no plan), or 2) I'd like to make a sort of me (= a plan), but am not sure how to do it. In 1) he gets to the chimpobos (or whatever we should call the immediate ancestor), and says: I can improve on these. I can increase the mental capacity by enlarging the brain, and by changing other parts of the anatomy in order to accommodate it. In 2) he says: I'm getting much closer now to what I want, but I think I need to enlarge the brain....etc. In both cases, there is a new species, which itself is then gradually refined (pelvis, thumb, larynx etc., as you point out) to become the huge-brained you ... and maybe the lesser-brained me! Whether the refinement is just monitored or is manipulated, of course, we have no way of knowing, which applies to all stages of evolution. I'd be inclined to think that any major innovation would be as a result of a UI's intervention rather than through existing species adapting to random changes in the environment. In your automatic scenario, why would the original mechanism have changed from chimpobo to hominid, since the chimpobos were doing OK (and are still around to prove it, although the bonobo is in trouble now)? -My two scenarios allow for all the other branches and extinctions and irrelevancies between first molecule and first homo sapiens, and do not rely on random changes to the environment. Please tell me how they contradict the evolutionary facts as we know them.-In your response to BBella, you ask: "What can 'outside interference' do to living primates to make their brains grow?" If there is such a thing as a UI that created the original physical mechanism, it could also interfere (experiment) with it as above, just as our puny human scientists interfere (experiment) even now with existing mechanisms.