Brain expansion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 13, 2020, 20:33 (1406 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: 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.

dhw: You persist in seeing evolution as a process of foretelling the future instead of responding to the present. We don’t know what caused speciation, but adaptation to new conditions must certainly have been a factor. Nobody has ever seen an organism adapt itself in anticipation of new conditions.

No adaptation we have ever seen creates a new species. New species do handle future conditions. and the consideration cannot be ignored

DAVID: 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: You seem to be saying that on Monday all skulls were 400 cc, and on Tuesday they were all 600 cc., and all pelvises enlarged from Monday to Tuesday. I don’t believe it. I stand by what I wrote above, and have no idea why you consider it to be illogical.

Do you still deny we have no evidence of tiny advancements? Just large gaps in size.

DAVID (under “Immune system complexity”): These kinds of interlocking defense systems require careful design, with especial care not to allow attacks on one own's tissues, especially when the virus is located intracellularly. This is not something 'cell committees' can develop, since the mechanisms must be present when the organism first appears in evolution. Survival depends upon it.

dhw: If you believe in common descent, every organism will have inherited an immune system, all the way back to bacteria! You simply cannot accept the idea that when cell communities merge and cooperate, they will further develop whatever system they have inherited. If I were a theist, I would say that God gave cells/cell communities the ability to develop their own immune system to cope with whatever conditions they encountered. This requires intelligence.

Whose intelligence? It is obvious the immune systems have the intelligent instructions to build the library.

dhw: I would find that much easier to believe than a theory claiming that God anticipated every possible threat to every organism and therefore provided the first cells with a programme of instructions (to be passed on through the whole history of life) to deal with each threat as it arose.

You have arrived at finally recognizing incorrectly my point about God's design of the immune systems. The immune cells are not innately intelligent. All infections can be handled in a small number of ways, killing cells directly or indirectly as previously described.