Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, April 30, 2018, 12:41 (587 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: QUESTION: After the final brain expansion, why was there such a long period of stasis (i.e. why did we live survival lives until recently)? Answer:

QUOTE: We know that 12,000 years ago marks the beginning of a revolution for humanity. This is when Earth’s climate entered a warm and unusually stable period known as the Holocene, which persists to this day. It seems likely that people have always tried to control and alter their environment, but with climatic stability such experiments were finally able to take off. Farming was born. And this had big implications for human evolution.
Your comment: During the past 12,000 years we really learned how to use our brains. We had been partially civilized; we had farmed food and lived above a survival existence which allowed us to really start thinking.

Dhw: You quote the answer to the question you've been asking, comment approvingly on it, but when I point out that it answers the question you’ve been asking, you try to reject it!

DAVID: Because I have a different spin on the interpretation of the facts. Your underlying theory is that at any level of human evolution new thought drives the enlargement of the brain in the next species. I am emphasizing the long pause in use of the brain after it enlarged as as answer to your favorite theory.

In my hypothesis it requires a new, major stimulus to produce each jump, and I have pointed out to you that there is a long period of stasis after every enlargement (= no new, major stimulus). I suggested that one jump may have been caused by the invention of tools and weapons. We have now been offered a reason (a lasting change of climate) for sapiens ending his own "long pause", but instead of enlargement (which I suggest was no longer practicable) the result was increased complexification.

DAVID: God speciates is our difference. Your two drives, from your Darwin background is survival and improvement. I agree about improvement and I call it complexity, but our brain was not needed for survival. That is obvious from the history of other primates. Survival is the tautology of Darwin theory.

Your question about the "long pause" has been answered, and so you change the subject! My proposal is that our brain was the result of the drive for improvement, and since you agree, why do you start moaning about Darwin again? You are discussing these issues with me.

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