I mostly side with this, I just think there’s always that possibility that devoted brain regions may have differed in earlier hominids (but that’s more of me playing devil’s advocate).
Not quite sure what you mean here, but all mammals (basically all vertebrates) have the same brain structures and architecture, and use the same structures for broadly the same purposes. There may be huge variations in the size of the structures, according to the importance of their function to that creature.
The biggest curveball for me with the consensus view that bigger equals smarter is the Neanderthals having a 20% larger brain than us. It might be that in a broad sense relative size equals more intelligence, but that sometimes the smaller brain could be more powerful per volume, therefore it might be a push.
Modern humans a somewhat smaller than our ancestors of those times, and the Neanderthals had larger bodies with larger eyes, both of which typically require a larger brain. A bigger brain doesn't necessarily mean smarter, although it seems Neanderthals has similar smarts.
Birds are far smarter than their brain size would indicate, but they have much smaller neurons, more densely packed in.
Yes, as you can tell I most definitely don’t have a problem with rapid periods of evolution, perhaps the only area where we differ with that is me thinking it could be way way more rapid than you think it could be.
It depends on the environment, the population size, the time to reproductive maturity, and a raft of lesser considerations. It's been a long time since I yawned my way through population genetics calculations, so I only have a rough idea these days, but there are obvious constraints on how fast populations can change.
There is no greater advantage imaginable than being able to outsmart all of your rivals! The opposite side of the coin can’t be ignored, if you gift one species with a property that is way TOO GOOD you are indirectly crushing the other species with a huge disadvantage (a virtual negative property). The random variation that was given to hominids handed us domination over the planet as I have mentioned before, but if one is to argue that evolution only works locally then it’s still a problem because it allowed hominids to unfairly dominate locally too.
Good and bad or fair and unfair are human value judgements. The only 'judgement' evolution makes is on reproductive success.
And isn’t everyone supposed to be in agreement that local predator/prey balances ARE under the jurisdiction of evolution?
Evolution does affect predator/prey relations in stable environments because predator and prey co-evolve; I'm not sure what you mean by '
under the jurisdiction' of evolution.
I just see the entire biosphere as a layered circle of life that starts at the level of chemistry, then we eventually make it up to the cellular level, tissue level, organs, organisms, populations, competition between other species, ecosystems, all the way to the entire biosphere. Each level has properties that emerge that can not be predictable from the lower levels. This is how our world works, all an interconnected system of emergent hierarchical levels.
Sure, I agree.
Why is there always a need to erect this evolutionary brick wall above the level of population and local species competition, and then claim that evolution can’t see over that wall?
I don't see any brick wall; but evolutionary processes become a lot more complex and indirect at the ecosystem level and above, and with the development of molecular biology, much of the work is bottom-up integration and clarification. If you don't understand the principles at lower levels, it's hard to see how the higher level systems emerge.
A distinction should also be made between evolutionary process, and the ACTUAL variation being given to a species.
The evolutionary process is how species change. Variations between species are instances of the results of evolution.
The evolutionary “process” is a numbers game, those in the population who do not RECEIVE the beneficial mutation eventually die off after enough generations pass by. ... The actual mutation that evolution hands to a species is totally different. This is the part where I see the guided part of evolution sneaking in, this is the part where I see that the game has been rigged in our favor. I understand that we were in a position to benefit from the mutation, but I just see the mutation as being much too beneficial and stacking the deck way too much in our favor.
Which is 'the' mutation you are talking about? Many mutations are not survivable and will result in miscarriage (spontaneous miscarriage is, overall,
more common than live birth). You can see many obvious instances of disadvantageous mutations in the population at large - is it surprising that there are also some beneficial ones?
I understand that as an atheist you think that the Biblical authors simply made up stories to describe the way that the world already was when they said “And God gave us dominion over all the Earth.” But as an atheist it should still strike you as very strange that the reality in which we find ourselves reveals “And a mutation gave hominids dominion over all the Earth.”
It doesn't seem strange at all - if humanity hadn't survived the population bottleneck ~70,000 years ago, things would be very different. Whether another similarly intelligent species would evolve if we vanished, it's impossible to say, but there was a variety of candidates when we were becoming human, and I suspect that most primates today have the potential in the right conditions.
I get it that this is the consensus story of the fossil record, but I just don’t see the fossil record as being convincing enough to back up that constantly slow progression story. I see the differences as just tiny differences that are still well within their hominid categories. I know that fossils aren’t too plentiful, but I feel like there’s enough of them for me to side with very very rapid leaps of evolutionary jumps. However I won’t consider myself dogmatically opposed to changing my opinion on rates of evolutionary jumps. For one I have never physically been to fossil museums where I can get up close and personal to many of them, and secondly more fossils can always be discovered.
If you follow the detailed changes in fossils through the history of their lineages, it's clear enough that they're sequential. Ultimately, though, the fossil record is just another line of evidence supporting the ToE - the theory predicts the pattern we should expect to see in the fossil record and the fossil record matches it exactly. The theory has been used to predict where (geographically) and when (in the timeline) we should expect to find certain species (e.g. particular transitionals) and they have been found as predicted.
Other lines of evolutionary evidence are far stronger indicators of the continuity of lineage evolution; for example, the ERVs in our genome - bits of viral genetic code that periodically become permanently incorporated into our genetic code. Not only do we share many of them with other primates (i.e. the same bit of viral code in the same place in the genome), but the pattern of similarities and differences of these insertions exactly matches the relationship hierarchy indicated by the fossil record and other evidence and predicted by the ToE.
