Chimps \'r\' not us: the role of gene enhancers (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 05, 2018, 14:22 (2278 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You leap from one subject to another! […] And now, as your grand finale, you switch the whole argument to our being special. Yes, we are special. That doesn’t make us the be-all and end-all of life on Earth. Nor does it prove that survivability is a minor issue, or no issue at all. Nor does it explain why your God took billions of years to produce the one thing he wanted to produce. And the 270,000 year gap is a non-issue.

DAVID: I'm still discussing survival of a human species, not individuals. At one point in our sapiens evolution it us thought we were down to 10,000 individuals, but the species grew larger in numbers and survived. It is called the 'bottleneck'. And I don't know why God took so long. Your question to me is totally unreasonable. My simple answer is He preposed evolving each step. That is obvious from the history .

You have forgotten what triggered this discussion. Here is the starting point:
DAVID: This fits the point of the book, Not a Chimp , 2009, which states we really are about 78% similar, despite the total DNA base comparison of 98%. And none of our difference is necessary for survival as shown by the survival of apes over the past 8 million years since we started to split off. Survivability is a minor evolutionary issue. Advancing complexity under God's guidance is a major issue.

We have agreed ad nauseam that no multicellular life forms were “necessary”, since bacteria have survived since the year dot. You have now at last agreed that improvement goes “hand in hand” with complexity, but you seem to think that once an organism is more complex, it doesn’t need to survive! Survival is always the first priority, for humans as for every other organism. And improving the chances of survival are anything but a minor issue. If you wish to confine the discussion to the human species, you said survival was of no issue at all, and yet you tell us that throughout the millions of years of our evolution, until a mere 30,000 years ago, all our innovations (tools, weapons, clothing, use of fire) served no purpose except to ensure or improve SURVIVAL. So once again, how can you claim that survivability was of no issue?

If it’s reasonable for you to ask why sapiens took so long to use his newly enlarged brain, it can hardly be unreasonable to ask why your God took so long to fulfil his sole purpose of producing sapiens’ brain? (Both ask: why the “gap”?) I don’t know what you mean by “prepose” here, but I presume it amounts to saying that was what he wanted to do, which really isn’t much of an explanation, is it? I have offered you several theistic reasons in the past: he didn’t know how to achieve his one and only purpose; he was experimenting; he didn’t think of sapiens till late on; producing sapiens was NOT his one and only purpose. All of them fit in with the “history”. You reject them all, and prefer the answer that God has his reasons, but you can’t think what they might be.