Do you consider adequate & satisfactory the answer below to the question posed below?

According to evolutionary theory, how did the large human brain with its high level of intelligence appear?
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According to evolutionary theory, the large human brain with its high level of intelligence emerged as a result of several key adaptations and pressures. One crucial factor was the shift from primarily competing with other animals for resources to competing with other humans for social status, acceptance, and leadership within groups.

Social Intelligence and Brain Development
As humans became more social and communicative, individuals with more advanced social skills were more likely to be selected and reproduce, driving the evolution of intelligence. This led to the development of a larger brain, particularly in the neocortex, which is responsible for higher-level functioning and cognitive abilities.

Nutritional Factors and Brain Development
Additionally, nutritional factors played a significant role in shaping brain development. Previc suggests that elevated dopamine levels, crucial for working memory and cognitive shifting, may have been influenced by access to high-quality nutrition, which in turn contributed to the evolution of human intelligence.

Cognitive Tradeoffs and Brain Development
The cognitive tradeoff hypothesis proposes that there was an evolutionary tradeoff between short-term working memory and complex language skills over the course of human evolution. This tradeoff may have driven the development of a larger brain, particularly in the regions responsible for language processing.

Tool Use and Brain Development
The emergence of tool use in early human species, such as Homo habilis, required a larger and more sophisticated brain to coordinate fine hand movements. This adaptation conferred a crucial evolutionary advantage, further driving the development of a larger brain.

Altriciality and Brain Development
Humans exhibit a unique pattern of altriciality, with a prolonged period of postnatal brain growth and development. This rapid postnatal enlargement of brain size is a key factor in the evolution of human intelligence, distinguishing humans from other primates.

In summary, the large human brain with its high level of intelligence emerged as a result of a combination of factors, including:
Social intelligence and competition for status and acceptance within groups
Nutritional factors influencing dopamine levels and brain development
Cognitive tradeoffs and adaptations for language and working memory
Tool use and the need for a larger brain to coordinate fine motor skills
Altriciality and the prolonged postnatal period of brain growth and development
These factors collectively contributed to the evolution of the human brain, enabling its remarkable size and cognitive abilities.

Do you disagree with any of this?:

AI response to
Are there any significant fossil discoveries that challenge or contradict Darwin’s predictions about gradualism…?
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The fossil record is characterized by discontinuities and gaps, rather than gradual transitions between major groups of organisms.
This challenges Darwin’s prediction of gradualism, where intermediate forms should be present.
Many fossils exhibit sudden appearances of new forms, without clear transitional stages.
This contradicts the expectation of gradual evolution over long periods.
The fossil record also shows stasis, where species remain unchanged for millions of years, despite the expectation of gradual adaptation to environments.

…many fossils exhibit reduced variation in morphology and physiology, despite changes in environmental conditions. …

Key Insights
The fossil record is incomplete, and appeals to its incompleteness are no longer tenable.
This means that the lack of transitional forms… cannot be attributed solely to the incompleteness of the fossil record.
The challenges to gradualism… are not limited to specific groups or time periods, but are a general feature of the fossil record.

Conclusion
While Darwin’s theory of natural selection remains a cornerstone of evolutionary biology, the fossil record presents significant challenges to his predictions about gradualism…
The discovery of discontinuities, gaps, and stasis in the fossil record… suggests that the process of evolution may be more complex and nuanced than initially thought.

“made me much better informed about evolution…
I read passages on evolution in my textbook”
Meaning of “evolution… evolution”?

“garbage… in the form of ID…
articulate and measured responses along with the links provided have made me much better informed”
What are 2 of your favorite anti-ID arguments?

“A good post is well worth repeating, since it was almost immediately buried in a swamp of sludge.
From Porphyry on 8/12″
How would you rate the reply to this?:

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“It is *perfectly normal* for a scientific theory to have things it can’t explain”
Can Darwin’s theory of natural selection explain the:
origin of ‘species’?
origin of new biological structures having novel functions?
origin of the massive quantity of information encoded in biology’s DNA?
fossil record’s pattern of abrupt appearances followed by stasis?

Can “the theory of evolution” explain the origination of the 1st biological lifeform?

“Today, GR is known not to work in certain contexts”
Such as where?

“examples of the predictive power of the theory of evolution is the discovery of Tiktaalik in 2004.
The paleontologists knew there needed to be a certain missing link between fish and quardupeds.
They knew generally what it should look like, what habitat it lived in, and when it must have lived.
So they knew what sort of rock formations it might be preserved in.
Then they went and started digging in those formations, and after several seasons, they found the damned thing.
That is remarkable predictive power.
Really think about that: ‘If you dig in these rocks, you’ll find fossils of a creature with these features that no one has ever seen before.’”
Between what fish and what “quarduped” is Tiktaalik a “missing link”?
Does “the theory of evolution” predict Archaeopteryx?

“Evolution also lets us make sense of a lot of an innumerable set of otherwise baffling things we find in the world of living things”
Does “evolution… make sense of” how come the giraffe has such a long neck?

“when the ID apologist comes in ans says we should reject evolution because there are things that it doesn’t neatly explain or that it can’t (yet) account for in detail”
Meaning of “evolution”?

“…ID doesn’t even constitute a theory.
It makes no predictions.
It explains nothing”
Does “the theory of evolution” predict that there are such things as:
‘junk DNA’?
vestigial organs?

“should read H.A. Orr’s review of Darwin’s Black Box”
Maybe I will.

[Behe]”In all of the scientific literature, however, no experimental evidence can be found that natural selection can produce irreducibly complex biochemical systems.
To rebut my arguments Orr could simply have cited papers in the science literature where the systems I discuss have been explained.
He didn’t do that because explanations are nowhere to be found.
…
The rotary nature of the flagellum has been recognized for about 25 years.
During that time not a single paper has been published in the biochemical literature even attempting to show how such a machine might have developed by natural selection.
Darwin’s theory is completely barren when it comes to explaining the origin of the flagellum or any other complex biochemical system.”

Michael J. Behe, “The Sterility of Darwinism” (Feb/March 1997)
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As it struggles to comprehend nature, science sometimes has to completely re-think how the world works.
For example, Newton’s laws apply to everyday objects but can’t handle nature’s tiny building blocks.
Propelled by this discovery, quantum mechanics overthrew Newton’s theory.
Revolutions in biology have included the cell theory of life in the 19th century, as well as the slow realization in this century that cells are composites of enormously complex molecular systems.

Newton’s theory remains very useful, and we can still learn many things by studying whole animals or cells.
When explaining the nuts and bolts of the world, however, those views must yield to more basic descriptions.
A mechanical engineer can’t contradict a physicist on fundamental principles of matter.
And evolutionary biology can’t overrule biochemistry^1 on fundamental principles of life.
It’s not a question of pride– that’s just the way the world works.

Curiously, some people seem offended by the way the world works.
In his review of my book, _Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution_, evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr unexpectedly attempts to claim priority for his field.
He grouses that pre-med students are required to take biochemistry but not evolutionary biology.
He plaintively asks “Why is everyone an expert witness when the topic is Darwinism but not when it’s biochemistry?”
The obvious reply is that the evolution of biochemical systems _is itself biochemistry_.
When a protein sequence changes, when DNA mutates, those are _biochemical_ changes.
Since inherited changes are caused by molecular changes, it is biochemists– not evolutionary biologists– who will ultimately decide whether Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection can explain life.
No offense– that’s just the way the world works.

Orr hankers for the respect accorded physicists, and thinks evolutionary biologists can finally lay aside their “physics envy” because “we biologists have discovered the structure of DNA, broken the genetic code, sequenced the entire genome of some species…”
Orr is like a podiatrist claiming credit for progress in brain surgery.
_Biochemistry_ made those dramatic advances; evolutionary biology played no part.
I mean no disrespect, but this is not a minor academic turf war– the point is crucial.
Anyone who wants to address questions about life’s basic mechanisms has to do so from a molecular perspective.
Orr does not.

Declining the opportunity to address my biochemical arguments, Orr questions the concept of irreducible complexity on logical grounds.
He agrees with me that
“You cannot… gradually improve a mousetrap by adding one part and then the next.
A trap having half its parts doesn’t function half as well as a real trap; it doesn’t function at all.”
So Orr understands the point of my mousetrap analogy– but then mysteriously forgets it.
He later writes,
“Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps).
Another part (B) later gets added, because it helps A.”
_Some_ part initially does _some_ job?
Which part of the mousetrap is he talking about?
A mouse has nothing to fear from a “trap” that consists of just an unattached holding bar, or spring, or platform, with no other parts.

I do sympathize with Orr’s muddling of the analysis.
The concept of irreducible complexity is new, and can be difficult to grasp for people who have always assumed without demonstration that small, continuous changes could produce virtually any biological structure.
Perhaps in the future that assumption will not have such a strong hold on the minds of evolutionary biologists.

Having completed his logical analysis, Orr turns to the topic of gene duplication:
“So how does Behe explain duplicate genes? He doesn’t.”
But I do.
I discuss them on pages 89-90 of my book, concluding
“The sequence similarities are there for all to see…
By itself, however, the hypothesis of gene duplication… says nothing about how any particular protein or protein system was first produced.”
For example, the DNA in each of the antibody-producing cells of your body is very similar to that of the others, but not identical.
The similarities are due to common descent; that is, all the cells in your body descended from one fertilized egg cell.
The differences, however, are not due to Darwinian natural selection.
Rather, there is a very clever, built-in program to rearrange antibody genes.
Billions of different kinds of antibody genes are “intentionally” produced by your body from a pre-existing stock of just a few hundred gene pieces.
Perhaps because of his unfamiliarity with molecular systems, Orr has trouble seeing that similarity in gene sequences may indicate common ancestry, but is not itself evidence that a system was constructed by natural selection.

To test natural selection requires much more evidence than mere sequence similarity: it requires _experimentation_.
In all of the scientific literature, however, no experimental evidence can be found that natural selection can produce irreducibly complex biochemical systems.
To rebut my arguments Orr could simply have cited papers in the science literature where the systems I discuss have been explained.
He didn’t do that because explanations are nowhere to be found.

What has biochemistry found that must be explained?
Machines– literally, machines made of molecules.
Let’s look at just one example.
The flagellum is an outboard motor that many bacteria use to swim.
It consists of a rotary propeller, motor, and stationary framework.
Yet this short description can’t do justice to the machine’s full complexity.
Writing of the flagellum in _Cell_,^2 Lucy Shapiro of Stanford University marvels,
“To carry out the feat of coordinating the ordered expression of about 50 genes, delivering the protein products of these genes to the construction site, and moving the correct parts to the upper floors while adhering to the design specification with a high degree of accuracy, the cell requires impressive organizational skills.”
Without any one of a number of parts, the flagellum does not merely work less efficiently; it does not work at all.
Like a mousetrap it is irreducibly complex and therefore cannot have arisen gradually.

The rotary nature of the flagellum has been recognized for about 25 years.
During that time not a single paper has been published in the biochemical literature even attempting to show how such a machine might have developed by natural selection.
Darwin’s theory is completely barren when it comes to explaining the origin of the flagellum or any other complex biochemical system.

The sterility of Darwinism indicates that it is the wrong framework for understanding the basis of life.
As I argue in my book, an alternative hypothesis is both natural and obvious:
systems such as the flagellum were intentionally designed by an intelligent agent.
Just as in the everyday world we immediately conclude design when we see a complex, interactive system such as a mousetrap, there is no reason to withhold the same conclusion from interactive molecular systems.
This conclusion may have theological implications that make some people uncomfortable;
nonetheless it is the job of science to follow the data wherever they lead, no matter how disturbing.

One last charge must be met: Orr maintains that the theory of intelligent design is not falsifiable.
He’s wrong.
To falsify design theory a scientist need only experimentally demonstrate that a bacterial flagellum, or any other comparably complex system, could arise by natural selection.
If that happened I would conclude that neither flagella nor any system of similar or lesser complexity had to have been designed.
In short, biochemical design would be neatly disproved.

Let’s turn the tables on Orr.
Is natural selection falsifiable?
He writes,
“We have no guarantee that we can reconstruct the history of a biochemical pathway.
But even if we can’t, its irreducible complexity cannot count against its gradual evolution…”
This is a dangerously antiscientific attitude.
In effect he is saying, “I just know that phenomenally complex biochemical systems arose gradually by natural selection, but don’t ask me how.”
With such an outlook, Orr runs the risk of clinging to ideas that are forever insulated from contact with the outside world.

After reading Robert Berwick’s criticism of _Climbing Mount Improbable_, I find myself in the odd position of sympathizing with Richard Dawkins.
Although his book is a juicy target for debunking, Berwick chides Dawkins for all the wrong reasons.
Berwick points out that natural selection is sometimes not a complete explanation for some biological feature.
For example, he writes that polioviruses have shapes like geodesic domes not because selection made them that way, but because the symmetrical shape is required by physical law.
Well, fine.
But there are many tasks a virus faces that are not explained at all by simple physical laws:
The virus has to attach to a cell surface, inject its genetic material into the cell, hijack the cell’s machinery, make copies of the poliovirus DNA, and re-package the genetic material.
In response the body’s immune system launches a counterattack to ferret out and destroy the virus.
None of these processes is explained by simple physical constraints.
Berwick seems mesmerized by the simple crystal that covers nature’s watch, and ignores the complex ticking gears of the mechanism within.
Dawkins’s writing should be roundly criticized for failing to answer the question he has set himself:
what is the origin of biological complexity?
But, to his credit, Dawkins at least knows the important question.
Berwick doesn’t.

Notes
1. By biochemistry I mean all sciences that investigate life at the molecular level, including molecular biology, much of embryology, immunology, genetics, etc.
2. Lucy Shapiro, “The Bacterial Flagellum: From Genetic Network to Complex Architecture,” _Cell_ 80 (1995): 525-27.

What are the correct predictions made by Darwin’s theory of natural selection?
I’d like to compare that list with the successful predictions made by the general theory of relativity.

“A century of correct predictions” (2 May 2019)
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General relativity was first experimentally verified in 1919.
On the centennial of this occasion, we celebrate the scientific progress fuelled by subsequent efforts at verifying its predictions, from time dilation to the observation of the shadow of a black hole.

Norman Macbeth, _Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason_ (1971)

Luther Sunderland, _Darwin’s Enigma: Ebbing the Tide of Naturalism_ (1988), a later edition of his earlier book bearing a similar title; on 38, 166+
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Page 38
Norman Macbeth has written a book, _Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason_, in which he gave an especially perceptive critique of Darwinism.
Noted philosopher of science Karl Popper reviewed this book and endorsed it, calling it “a really important contribution to the debate.”^26 …
Norman Macbeth’s Harvard Debate

In a debate sponsored by the humanist chaplain at Harvard University on September 24, 1983, between Norman Macbeth and Dr. Kenneth Miller, Macbeth made the following statement:

“Here I should again make it clear that Darwinism and evolution are not the same thing.
Evolution is the course of change through time, and Darwinism is the explanation of it.
I think that the change in the course of time– the evolution– is beyond challenge.
You can see it in the fossils very clearly, and you can almost see it in a few centuries or even a lifetime.
Darwinism is a different affair, one of explaining it.
My attack in my book and elsewhere was on the ideas of Charles Darwin, explaining the mechanism by which the changes occurred.
I am not a professional biologist….
I have got into the polemics– the thrusting and parrying back and forth on the problems of Darwinism– and for that you don’t need too profound a knowledge of anatomy or physiology.

I want to make a startling observation: that it might be advantageous not to have any courses under your belt in biology.
The reason I say this is that as I have dealt with biologists over the last 20 years now, I have found that in a way they are hampered by having too much education.
They have been steeped from their childhood in the Darwinian views, and, as a result, it has taken possession of their minds to such an extent that they are almost unable to see many facts that are not in harmony with Darwinism.
These facts simply aren’t there for them often, and other ones are sort of suppressed or distorted.
I’ll give you some examples.

First, and perhaps most important, is the first appearance of fossils.
This occurs at a time called the “Cambrian,” 600 million years ago by the fossil reckoning.
The fossils appear at that time in a pretty highly developed form.
They don’t start very low and evolve bit by bit over long periods of time.
In the lowest fossil-bearing strata of all, they are already there and are pretty complicated in more-or-less modern form.

One example of this is the little animal called the trilobite.
There are a great many fossils of the trilobite right there at the beginning with no build-up to it.
And, if you examine them closely, you will find that they are not simple animals.
They are small, but they have an eye that has been discussed a great deal in recent years– an eye that is simply incredible.
It is made up of dozens of little tubes which are all at slightly different angles so that it covers the entire field of vision, with a different tube pointing at each spot on the horizon.
But these tubes are all more complicated than that, by far.
They have a lens on them that is optically arranged in a very complicated way, and it is bound into another layer that has to be just exactly right for them to see anything….

But the more complicated it is, the less likely it is simply to have grown up out of nothing.
And this situation has troubled everybody from the beginning– to have everything at the very opening of the drama.
The curtain goes up and you have the players on the stage already, entirely in modern costumes.

The Creationists say, “That is abrupt appearance,” and they hammer away at that.
Instead of building up bit by bit, it appears suddenly, and that to them signifies creation.
I don’t want to argue that, but I admit it is very strange that there is no slow build-up.
The evolutionists have strained very hard to find earlier fossils and have had very meager results.

I find it odd that a leading evolutionist who is also a specialist in trilobites, Niles Eldredge of the American Museum in Natural History, never even mentions these problems of the eye.
He has a recent book directed at the Creationists called _The Monkey Business_.
He has several pages on the trilobite there, but he never mentions this eye which is really the hardest part of the problem.
I think he does it because he simply can’t see the significance of all these things when he is utterly convinced that [are you sure?  I thought Eldredge was into punctuated equilibrium -df] there must have been a slow build-up, but we just don’t have any fossils for it.
Maybe the conditions were wrong, or we’ll find them later.

Then also, if you ask evolutionists what is their best case, normally, their answer is “the case of the peppered moth in England.”
This moth has two forms– the white and the black.
In ancient times, up to about the 18th century, the white form was more numerous than the black, not overwhelmingly so, but more numerous.
The industrial revolution began at that time in England and, bit by bit, the leaves and other vegetation, as well as the buildings, began to turn grimy and black.
The white moths then became conspicuous against the black and sooty background, and they began to be picked off by predators– birds, maybe.
It’s turning the other way now, and the black forms are getting a little closer to equality again in numbers.
This is presented in practically every textbook on Darwinism as a wonderful example of natural selection at work in evolution.
But is it anything like that?
If you aren’t pervaded with the idea to begin with– if you aren’t what is now called “theory laden”– does that mean anything?
There were two forms; there always were two forms and still are two forms.
Under certain conditions, the blacks do better; and under other conditions, the whites do better.
But there is no evolution– there’s no change.
There’s no new form, and yet this is presented as their greatest example of what can be done.

I want also to point out something that I honestly think they are fully aware of.
That is the scantiness of their performance over the last 120 years.
Darwin’s book _The Origin of Species_ came out in 1859 propounding the idea of natural selection.
The whole point of it was that we would now be able to explain where the animals and plants came from– how they built up to their present form.
So, naturally, the first thing you expect is that now we’ll have some family trees, some pedigrees, showing how the present moose developed out of earlier forms.
A whole series of them should be presented.
These are called “phylogenies” by the biologists.
A pedigree is the same thing and a family tree is the same thing.
If you look at modern textbooks, you’ll find very few family trees.
In the early days– in the last century– they had enormous family trees reaching all the way from vertebrates back to the amoebae.
All stages were represented in very fancy and complete trees.
You hardly ever find anything like that anymore– an occasional bush that is by no means convincing or impressive.
The reason why is that they can’t trace the ancestry.

After 120 years, it is possible to say with considerable certainty that they haven’t got a single solid reliable phylogeny.
And after 120 years, that is a very poor performance.
I think they should candidly face up to that and recognize that Darwinism hasn’t been producing much.”

Macbeth’s debate opponent, Dr. Miller, made no attempt to address these specific points.
Instead he talked about what he would have said if he had been debating a Creationist, i.e., attack a straightforward interpretation of the Bible.

“the general theory of relativity proposed by Einstein in November 1915… could calculate Mercury’s ‘anomalous’ precession with a precision demanded by observational accuracy.
…
Mercury’s precession was a directly derived result of the full general theory”

Relativistic perihelion precession of orbits of Venus and the Earth
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Among all the theories proposed to explain the ‘anomalous’ perihelion precession of Mercury’s orbit announced in 1859 by Le Verrier, the general theory of relativity proposed by Einstein in November 1915, alone could calculate Mercury’s ‘anomalous’ precession with a precision demanded by observational accuracy.
Since Mercury’s precession was a directly derived result of the full general theory, it was viewed by Einstein as the most critical test of general relativity, amongst the three tests proposed by him.
With the advent of the space age, the observational accuracy level has improved further and it became possible to detect this precession for other planetary orbits of the solar system — viz., Venus and the Earth.
This conclusively proved that the phenomenon of ‘anomalous’ perihelion precession of planetary orbits is really a relativistic effect.
Our previous papers presented the mathematical model and the computed value of the relativistic perihelion precession of Mercury’s orbit using an alternate relativistic gravitational model, which is a remodeled form of Einstein’s relativity theories, and which retained only experimentally proven principles and has been enriched by the benefits of almost a century-long relativity experimentation including the space age experiments.
Using this model, we present in this paper the computed values of the relativistic precession of Venus and the Earth, which compare well with the predictions of general relativity and also are in agreement with the observed values within the range of uncertainty.

“Is your point that you con’t have information without a mind?”
The operation of mind/intelligence much more plausibly explains the presence of information
than
alleging that totally-mindless-at-every-level processes produced that information.
Dawkins has utterly no clue how the massive amount of information present in biology’s DNA could have originated.

“if a theory makes predictions, and those predictions turn out to be wrong… That tells you that there is a problem–either the theory is just wrong, or the theory is missing something significant.
…early Darwinism seemed to suggest that evolution should be more or less continuous.
As we did more paeleontology, what we found was periods of relative stability punctuated by periods of rapid change.
That was taken as a sign that early Darwinism was incomplete; there were factors we didn’t yet understand”
Do you believe that the fossil record poses 0 problems for Darwin’s theory of natural selection?

Essay “Problems with the Theory of Natural Selection”
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