Question for evolutionists

[BradyC]

I'm sure this has been brought up sometime on these forums but I didn't feel like searching. Now all I have is a HS education, so I was hoping all the the brainiacs with PhDs could clear up something for me. It is obvious that human beings have the ability to think and reason. If we are a product of chance (irrationality), how do we make the jump from irrationality to rationality?

[TomCollins]

What makes you think humans are rational?

[benkahuna]

I'm not even really sure what you are asking here.

Are you saying disorder and irrationality are the same thing? Are you asking how the ability to think came from this muck of disorder? If you explain a little more precisely, I can give you a much better answer.

[BradyC]

How does one validate logic if he or she believes they are a product of chance?

Well it depends on your definitions.

What signs of logic are you looking for? The fact we have a language? Animals can communicate. The fact we ponder our existance and have things such as religion? That is where I would like some answers.

Im a stout evolutionist, but I have never really given thought to this. If you look at the evolutionary chain, you've got a ton of lower-thinking life forms, and then boom! us, the acme of evolution, self-realized beings.

How was the jump made?

[theweatherman]

evolution isnt really about chance so much as it is about natural selection. Chance brings about mutations but natural selection is a very rational process that weeds out the negative mutations and strenghtens the positive ones.

Human evolution is a result of rational natural selection and not merely chance.

[bocablkr]

[ QUOTE ]
Well it depends on your definitions.

What signs of logic are you looking for? The fact we have a language? Animals can communicate. The fact we ponder our existance and have things such as religion? That is where I would like some answers.

Im a stout evolutionist, but I have never really given thought to this. If you look at the evolutionary chain, you've got a ton of lower-thinking life forms, and then boom! us, the acme of evolution, self-realized beings .

How was the jump made?

[/ QUOTE ]

How can you claim to be a stout evolutionist and then claim there is a jump? Study some more - especially the evolutionary branch from early man upto the present. It is a far more gradual process than you indicate. And there are many other species highly evolved and intelligent (though maybe not self-aware).

Um, have you read an evolutionist text recently? There are as many if's and maybe's in there as all of the world's holy books combined.

So if you have the answer, would you outline it for me?

[benkahuna]

[ QUOTE ]
How does one validate logic if he or she believes they are a product of chance?

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think living systems are about chance at all. I think they are highly ordered systems that follow set principles in order to survive. There's nothing random about how life develops sense organs and the ability to pursue sustenance and favorable environmental conditions. It's the very opposite of chance. This process results from selective pressures that drive the trend that is natural selection.

I don't think humans are necessarily logical. It's more that:

1. We have develop in accordance with the outside world, shaping our nervous system to respond to information in a meaningful way.
2. We are very adapative and creative enabling us to better survive than our nearest living relatives (specieswise).
3. Our abilities result in certain trial and error type behaviors. Such behaviors occur in plenty of other animals (pretty much all with a cortex, capable of learning), we're just way better at them.
4. We work in such a way that we'll have meaningful and accurate interactions with the outside world. Such interactions increase our chances of suriving to reproduce fertile offspring.


I think it's a huge misnomer to conceptualize humans as the first logical living systems or the first emergence of rationality from a sea of randomness.
Everything about humans suggests we're just following one evolutionary trend resulting in:

1. Higher brain:body ratio
2. Great descending control of autonomic function (conscious control of heartbeat, etc.)
3. Great physical coordination in hands
4. A more sophisticated visual system and greater proportions of the brain related to vision
5. Movement toward upright bipedalism

Humans are not unique in either consciousness or self-awareness either. We do, however, appear to be unique in the sophistication of our ability to use language and the ability to consider many abstract concepts like justice, society, etc. The trends I mention are merely one set of trends toward one niche. I'm not suggesting we're some sort of idealized evolutionary endpoint. There's absolutely no reason to believe that we are.

[bocablkr]

[ QUOTE ]
Um, have you read an evolutionist text recently? There are as many if's and maybe's in there as all of the world's holy books combined.

So if you have the answer, would you outline it for me?

[/ QUOTE ]

What books are you reading?? If's and maybe's don't correlate to a 'big jump'. We did not just pop out of nowhere on the evolutionary tree. There are many transistional fossils to show the process was quite orderly (even though there are gaps in the record). That does not mean it just jumped from lower species to modern man.

The Evolutionary Tree
Humans are mammals of the Primate order. The earliest primates evolved about 65 million years ago in the geological period known as the Paleocene epoch. They were small-brained, arboreal fruit eaters, similar to modern tree shrews. Primates of the Eocene epoch (55 to 38 million years ago) were similar and ancestral to contemporary tarsiers, lemurs, and tree shrews, and are classified as lower primates or prosimians. During the late Eocene, the higher primates, or anthropoids, developed from prosimian ancestors and, aided by continental drift, diverged into New World (or platyrrhine) and Old World (or catarrhine) monkeys. The branching of Old World monkeys and hominoids apparently occurred in the late Oligocene (38 to 25 million years ago) or early Miocene (25 to 8 million years ago), a time period poorly represented in the fossil record. The lesser apes (gibbons and siamangs) and other hominoid lines diverged about 20 million years ago, while the Asian great apes (the orangutan being the only surviving form) diverged from the African hominoids about 15 to 10 million years ago. Genetic evidence suggests that the ancestral lines of gorillas diverged about 8 million years ago and that chimpanzees and hominids diverged about 5 million years ago.



Hominid Evolution
The earliest known hominids are members of the genus Australopithecus, the earliest of which date to more than 4 million years ago. Unlike other primates, but like all hominids, australopithecines were bipedal. Their crania, however, were small and apelike, with an average cranial capacity of about 450 cc in the gracile species and 600 cc in the robust forms. Australopithecines that have been considered ancestral in the lineage leading to the human genus [censored] include A. afarensis (an important skeleton of which is popularly known as Lucy) and A. africanus. The exact position of these and other early species on the hominid family tree continues to be disputed.

The first member of the genus [censored], a small gracile species known as H. habilis, was present in east Africa at least 2 million years ago. H. habilis was the first hominid to exhibit the marked expansion of the brain (with an average cranial capacity of about 750 cc) that would become a hallmark of subsequent hominid evolutionary history. By about 1.6 million years ago, H. habilis had evolved into a larger, more robust, and larger-brained species known as [censored] erectus. Cranial capacities ranged from about 900 cc in early specimens to 1050 cc in later ones. H. erectus persisted for well over a million years and migrated off the African continent into Asia, Indonesia, and Europe.

Between 500,000 and 250,000 years ago, H. erectus evolved into H. sapiens. Transitional forms between H. erectus and H. sapiens are referred to as archaic H. sapiens. With the exception of H. sapiens neandertalensis (see Neanderthal man), no additional subspecies are recognized. Indeed, some scientists consider Neanderthal a separate species. Archaic H. sapiens changed gradually, becoming somewhat larger, more gracile and larger-brained through time. Cranial capacity, for example, increased from about 1150 cc in early transitional forms to the current world average of just over 1350 cc. By 150,000 years ago in Africa and Asia and 28,000 years ago in Europe (see Cro-Magnon man), the transition to H. sapiens was complete, and fully modern humans became the single surviving hominid species.