Human evolution; neonatal human and Neanderthal brains (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 14, 2019, 15:46 (1596 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: What I believe is God guided evolution constantly or with much pre-programming or pre-planning.

dhw: The only way your God could “guide evolution constantly” is through preprogramming or dabbling. So do you think he preprogrammed or dabbled every single “enormous” whale change in order to cover the time he had decided to take before embarking on achieving his one and only purpose – the design of H. sapiens? And would you agree that since these enormous changes were “adaptations”, it is difficult to draw a borderline between adaptation and innovation as processes that lead to speciation?

You are confusing two words: as I use them adaptation is the same species sightly adjusted. Innovation creates a new species.

Taken from all the different hominin threads:
DAVID: It looks like we will find more and more branches in the bush of hominins. To me there is an obvious push to get us evolved. The bald facts are all the other advanced apes did not move on like we did in this burst of activity.

DAVID: So many hominins their existences overlap. I wish we knew how the 'speciation event' occurred.

QUOTE: “Denisovans are actually three different groups, with more genetic diversity in less than a dozen bones that currently comprise their entire fossil sample than in the more than 7.7 billion modern humans alive today."

DAVID (on Neanderthals): Essentially our brains develop quite differently and may represent better cognition in humans. All of this evidence supports the idea we were the final goal of evolution.

dhw: As with whales, so with hominins and humans. If your God is always in charge and knows precisely what he is doing and has the one goal of producing H. sapiens, why would he have preprogrammed or dabbled so many different types of hominins and humans? At the very best, I would suggest this fits in more with divine experimentation than with a God who knows exactly how to achieve his one and only goal. So please explain your theory of why he needed to preprogramme/dabble all the different stages of whale in order to cover the time he had decided not to achieve his “final goal”, and why he needed to preprogramme or dabble all the different and now extinct forms of human if all he wanted was us and he was always in charge.

Covered all of this before. The different final forms lived in different environments and with interbreeding brought different beneficial attributes to the human final product. It is quite clear to me God knew how to evolve humans from bacteria, but rather than directly implanting those beneficial attributes, he created mechanisms within the various hominin/homo groups to allow natural living development.