here we are in agreement. The brain wiring is partially constrained but the
details cannot be determined by our genes.
>
>Now you are going again off the path as I see it. I have repeat ably said
>that I don't see the connection between the wiring of the brain and darwinism
>or its derivatives. Once again you seem to go on some different route. In
>this message you ended up talking about free will, but we have not been
>talking about free will.
I am highly distractable, which explains why I can't stick with just one
area of science. :-)
In the previous message you ended up talking about
>the old-earth-flood, but we were not talking about that either.
Remember that everything is interconnected. One issue has implications for
thousands of other issues. You have been talking about science eventually
claiming that everything could be reduced to our genes. I was trying to
address that.
> We were
>talking about the wiring of the brain and I asked, what does that have to do
>with macro-evolution? As I remember it has to do with the fact that some
>people (IDers?) claim that all the information for the wiring have to be in
>the genes in a supradeterministic way. I said I don't agree, and added that,
>nevertheless, the "necessary" (but not sufficient) information has to be in
>the genes. No genes, no brain. Finally I said that the general wiring
>pattern is somehow determined by a natural principle (Bejan's Principle or
>some other like it). So the "necessary" info that so beautifully take
>advantage of Bejan's Principle (as our inner ears take advantage of gravity
>for balance) to wire the brain must have been in the genes. As someone else
>said, the machinery necessary to do the Job was coded. I think this is a good
>summary of what I have shared with you on this topic; unfortunately my
>question remains unanswered - what does brain wiring have to do with
macro-evolution?
Well, I must have missed this last question. Nothing and everything. If
macroevolution occurs, then a reptile brain must have evolved into a
mammalian brain and a primitive mammalian brain must have become a carnivore
brain which eventually became a cat brain (though I am not impressed with
the one my cat possesses). According to Deacon enlargement in one part of
the brain during development, creates a competition among the initial
neuronal connections from various parts of the brain to the cortex. When the
neuronal cells die off during the later stages of development, regions with
more connections, take over a larger percentage of the cortex. In
otherwords, they outcompete other parts. For instance, if you were to scale
up a chimp brain to our size, one would expect various regions of the cortex
to have similar percentages of the brain's surface area. But this is not
the case. The prefrontal region of men is 202% larger than what should exist
for an ape of our size. Because of this, we have less cortex devoted to
other tasks. We have only 77% of the tactile region of the brain, 35% as
much motor cortex, 60% of the visual cortex and 32% of the olfactory region.
(See Deacon The Symbolic Species, p. 217)
The brain evolves as a change in the percentage of connections made from
various regions of the brain.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm