Brain expansion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 13, 2020, 00:08 (1412 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Saturday, June 13, 2020, 00:14

DAVID: I know your bottom-up theory. Complex memory ability simply appeared, because cells can do it!

dhw: No, it didn’t simply appear. Cells have memory, and by combining and cooperating, they increased the complexity of that memory. Theistic version: instead of your God preprogramming or dabbling each advance in complexity, he gave cells the ability (intelligence) to do their own combining and cooperating.

And I won't accept any theory which reduced the problems of future design to simple cells that have no idea what the future requires.

DAVID: How does the baby's new skull size tell the mother's pelvis to enlarge?

dhw: It doesn’t! The cell communities that form the mother’s pelvis find themselves confronted with a new problem – a bigger skull. And as all cell communities do when confronted with new requirements, they adapt or die (and no doubt many do die before the process is completed)! You seem to think that the skull and the pelvis have to expand simultaneously in anticipation of the problem! That is not how adaptation works in any context.

DAVID: Woolly thinking! It has to be simultaneous! With a bigger baby head arriving, the pelvis has to be bigger at the same time! The father's genes played a role, but didn't tell Mom's genes.

dhw: We have no idea how gradual this process was, but I am suggesting that until the pelvis had adapted to the new size of skull, there may well have been lots of dead babies and mothers. That is how adaptation works: one change demands others.

Still illogically defending the obvious need for simultaneity. No one would ever survive under you illogical answer. Your 'adaptation' requires small changes, as Darwin thought. We know successive species made large cerebral jumps in size.

dhw: Originally you wrote: “God gave all early immune systems, animal and man the ability to develop a library of responses.” I would suggest that this means he gave them the autonomous ability to create or develop the library, and not that the cells of the immune system obeyed 3.8-billion-year-old instructions or were dabbled with “as infections occurred” and automatically held on to each instruction it had miraculously chosen from the programme or been supplied with via a dabble.

Quit trying to reinterpret me. Immune cells know how to create antibodies to any and all antigens offered by infective agents. Each species with an immune system is so programmed.

DAVID: Your proposal is that the erectus brain designed the sapiens brain. Really?

dhw: No, my proposal is precisely the same as your proposal for the immune system: that the existing cell communities develop a system or “library” as they learn. Each new infection is a new book. Each new experience is an addition to the “library” of the brain. […] The cell communities of the erectus brain did not design the cell communities of the sapiens brain: the sapiens brain emerged from the process of complexification and expansion of the erectus brain, and the sapiens cell communities continue (vastly) to expand their “library” through complexification (which is so efficient that some volumes can even be discarded).

DAVID: You are conflating the functions of two very different systems…

dhw: Not the functions! The process of development!

Cells can foresee the future requirements in your theory. That does not explain today's entry about the human cerebellum alterations from animals. Which brain cells did that foreseeing of our future socialization needs?

DAVID: Smart design, smart cells, all require a smart designer who makes cells look intelligent.

dhw: Or a smart designer who gives cells an autonomous intelligence to work out their own designs (theistic version).

Your designer is not my designer.

DAVID: dhw has questioned why so many pre-human varieties appeared during evolution. The answer is obvious. The varied experience by all the different populations combined many helpful genes into the sapiens genome.

dhw: So we have your God dabbling or preprogramming the changes in various brains and immune systems (since you now reject the idea of cells being able to develop their own library), and specially designing each of these human species - including those that became extinct before sapiens arrived - dabbling or preprogramming different attributes into them, and then preprogramming or dabbling a selection of those attributes into the only species he actually wanted to design, which was H. sapiens. Is that correct?

Yes. God is a direct designer, of all that appears