Chimp vs. human brain (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 11, 2012, 09:00 (4162 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Do you believe that 1) God tinkered with an existing spider's abdomen, 2) that he created web-spinning spiders separately, 3) that he planned web-spinning when he invented the first mechanisms for reproduction, heredity, adaptation and innovation, or 4) that web-spinning happened through the inventive intelligence of those mechanisms being brought into play when the environment allowed for such inventions? Needless to say, the question has a crucial bearing on your evolutionary teleology.-DAVID: Only No. 4. DNA is coded so complexly and carefully that all sorts of convergences are allowed to be tried. As I've said it appears that complexification is built-in to the genome.-Good, we agree. My point is that if web-spinning was not the result of God's interference, and was not pre-planned, the initial mechanisms were indeed left to try "all sorts of convergences", so why do you believe that humans alone were pre-planned? This anthropocentric view of God's "purpose" seems to me to run counter to all that we observe in the history of the living world, with its enormous range of special organs and species extant and extinct. Even if I believed in a creator God, I would still say that these suggest let's-see-what-happens rather than this-is-what-I've planned. -In the overall context of our discussions, I'm looking for compromise positions between theism and atheism, and it seems to me that the higgledy-piggledy, unplanned course of evolution is one area where there is no reason for disagreement. The inventive intelligence of the mechanisms for reproduction, heredity, adaptation and innovation are another matter entirely, but while I do not believe that such complexity could assemble itself by chance, that brings us back to a first cause, on which there will never be agreement. Higgledy-piggledy evolution applies whether there is or isn't a God. It does not invalidate the design argument (as Darwin acknowledged), but it removes the conventional theist's anthropocentrism and reduces the atheist's dependence on random mutations. A worthwhile step towards reconciling the warring parties?-DAVID: I just spotted another science report to support my theory that humans are the logical end point for God's plan to have conscious humans on earth:-http://phys.org/news/2012-12-flores-hobbit-revealed.html-The Hobbits are one of four lines of humans that co-existed in the recent past. Our line, the Neanderthals, the Denosovans and the Hobbits. Why produce a branching tree unless the result is an important part of the plan? -Why indeed? Especially when you make all those other lines extinct? Why produce dodos and dinosaurs? If I plan to make a fruit cake (often an apt description of homo sapiens), do I have to make and chuck out a sponge cake, a carrot cake and a battenburg as well?
 
DAVID: Convergence is throughout evolution. The famous example is vision, six different types of eye organs in various unrelated branches of evolution. All an attempt to produce complexity until the goal is achieved. -What goal? Please tell me why you think God "allowed to be tried" the complexities of six different types of eye, spiders' webs, dogs' noses, camels' humps, elephants' trunks etc.?