Hi. I was recently debating a theist. He claims that there has to be an intelligent designer, that we couldn’t have evolved from a common ancestor. His argument was that the earliest life forms would have needed a brain (of some kind) to be able to store information/memory, in order to be able to evolve and survive. Eg If an early life form had no brain etc how would it remember/know not to keep making the same mistakes and getting itself killed? So he says we had to be designed/created with a brain in the first place.
Hope that makes sense. Thanks in advance.
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Simply ask the idiot to explain how sea the star, sea cucumber, sea lily, sea urchin, sea anemone, sea squirt, sea sponge, coral, and Portuguese Man-O-War all have no 'brains'and function, develop, evolve fine and have ancestral lineage...
Well said, @Random. And DNA is proof for similarities (Bonobos share 99% of our DNA) and the fact of having a common ancestor.
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Then he is a fool to believe that an organism can't survive without a brain. Look at Donald Trump as a perfect example.
Seriously though. Bacteria and plants have no brains and survive just fine.
This is typical:
"..He claims that there has to be an intelligent designer, that we couldn’t have evolved from a common ancestor.."
Religionists think they are being rational when all they are doing is observing or hearing something they can't explain and jumping to the conclusion that it requires the supernatural.
Looose Bree
Ask him how he got here, was it his parents or god.
That part is totally screwy. How exactly is a brain supposed to help prevent a 2nd death in the same organism? Just weird.
Thanks for the answers people.
Nyarlothotep - I probably didn’t explain too well. I think he was saying for example - if an animal had to learn to avoid getting killed by say, avoiding a predator, if it didn’t have a brain, how could it learn this behaviour and pass that info on???
Genes and memes that give organisms an advantage in their niche tend to propagate through the generations.
Learned behavior is not passed on (not by genetics anyway); so the question is rather silly. Let me try to rephrase the question:
How do creatures get the ability to avoid predators; especially creatures with little or no brains?
Again the answer is variation + natural selection. The offspring of a given creature will have variation between them. Those that have variations which increase the likelihood of the offspring having offspring of it's own will be selected for (by the destruction o f those who do not have it).
To make it more concrete; lets say we a population of 100 otherwise similar creatures. 50 of them hide when they see a shadow and 50 of them don't. And lets put them in an environment where the predators tend to cast shadows onto their prey before they eat them. Then we let these animals live reproduce and die for a few generations then collect 100 sample creatures from the population and test them. You'll find that more than 50 will hide when they see a shadow; because those creatures will be more likely to have offspring. They will quickly dominate the gene pool.
Behaviors do not have to be learned. Some are, some aren’t. Although not a biologist, I would suspect that the behaviors that are not dependent on learning, would not always require a brain.
Tell him to look into god of the gaps
Tell your theist friend he's echoing the ideas of an atheist communist nutcase called Trofim Lysenko, who convinced Stalin that crop plants could be "taught" to grow in extreme conditions. Lots of good scientists were purged, and millions died of starvation because of Stalin's religious devotion to Lysenko's crazy theory.
Whether they have brains or not, species don't learn. If conditions change, they all die except the ones with random mutations that better equip them for survival in the new environment. Their progeny also have mutations. That ones that change in positive ways prosper and produce more offspring. The others die out. Almost all species have gone extinct.
The problem is that you are actually debating with this idiot. If that person doesn't understand simple biology he/she can't comprehend anything close to complicated.
The changes are within the allele frequencies of a population over multiple generations, entirely genetic, nothing to do with thought or goals or any type of agency guided morphological differentiation.
But, of course, all this means is that he either doesn't understand anything about evolution or refuses to acknowledge any type of understanding of it, because the straw man argument against is the only argument against. So he either has no idea how it works, and you could therefore teach him, or he does have an idea (maybe not a complete understanding) and simply posits absurd impossibilities in a disingenuous display of indignation. Wannabelievers will often say almost anything to rationalize their position. I would recommend reading "The God Delusion " by Richard Dawkins. Or "The Blind Watchmaker " while it's not all science, they are very informative and would, almost accidentally, increase most people's understanding of evolution ten fold.
1. Begging the Question: You don't get to ask, "Who" created anything. It is a fallacy. You are making an unfounded assumption that a "Who" did something.
2. Asserting that everything was created with a brain is just wrong. Plants do not have brains. All evidence suggests that food sources came before things that ate them.
3. Even plants have learned to lean into the light. Your friend is confusing survival instinct with thinking. Consciousness is an emergent property of a brain. Different brains create different consciousnesses. Beings without survival instincts do not survive.
4. Finally, this is a "God of the Gaps" assertion. He can not explain consciousness or survival and so he inserts a God. Another fallacious argument. Even if beings avoid danger and have a sense of preservation. prove that your idea of a god did it.
He is still left having to prove that his god is real and that it did anything.
***"the selfish Gene " by Richard Dawkins. Not The God Delusion, though that is a very good book as well... So I still recommend it.
Here is a wallpaper I made of a series of memes for my desktop slide show (attached image).
rmfr
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Loose Bree,
All animals vertebrate animals are simply worms with specialized bodies that enable them to survive and function in a variety of environments. Your basic worm is simply your intestinal tract. Humans even have brain cells in their guts. Everything else is simply accessories. That's are basic common ancestor.
Humans didn't evolve from the common apes. Humans and apes co-evolved from a basic ancestor. Humans are much older than apes, which explains why we are more advanced.
Humans are apes. And there were non human apes before homo sapiens.
"More advanced" is actually a meaningless concept in evolution because there is no end goal or final morphology.