The human brain is not part of of the natural organism

I'll start with this: the balance of nature is a human conceit. Nature doesn't give a damn either way whether she's stable or not.

Elephants also have a population boom-crash cycle where they can practically denude an area and then starve. We are no less natural than elephants.


"Why did we start to think?"

How do you know other animals can't think? I always thought it was something of a continuous process - we just happen to think more.

Every article on the topic from a biologist I've ever read remarks on the absurdly fast evolution of the human brain, usually referring to the incredible speed we went from ape-craniums to modern size.

LAst night on the NOVA series about "Becoming Human" they speculated that fire was a very important component of our rapid evo/devo. Fire allowed us to make meat more digestable and palatable. As we sat around waiting for our prey to cook over the fire, our brain pans qwere jasut taking in and expanding.
Soon after cooked food,we invented chess.

I'd certainly say fire was a game-changer, one of many yet to come.

That sort of thing is "relativist." What's one's definition of rapid? By the way, cranial capacity is no clue to the quality or value of the brain contained therein. Both Neanderthals and Cro Magnon had larger brain cases than we do.

I wonder how the females lived through birthing with such larger brains?

BBB

Rapid as compared to other evolutionary changes with which I hope I can assume the biologists were familiar. Of course it's relative.

Certainly, whale brains are somewhat bigger than ours, yet we're smarter. But, change is change. Regardless, if the change was no indication of quality, then how on earth did it get selected for?

Yes, of course it's relative, which is why i found your comment meaningless. There have been significant changes in species which have been noted in the lifetimes of humans--the moths around Manchester, England come to mind.

To assume that evolution always selects properly for the most efficacious trait is to badly misunderstand the process. The brain cases of Neanderthal may have allowed for a larger brain, but they would have made child birth an extremely painful and very dangerous experience for the women involved. I suspect that the brain cases of early modern man represent a "fine tuning," a successful adaptive compromise between the available space and the trauma of child birth. The larger brain cases having been selected for is not evidence that it was the best evolutionary path.

Yeah, see my response below. Child birth must have been hell for Neanderthal women.

(Oops, that response is below yours, but above this one.)

Thanks, Set for your informative response.

BBB

If humans had bigger pelvises, birthing wouldn't be quite so problematic. That might effect our agility, though.

"birth hips" does not make any difference in ability to give birth, according to my sources.

What about Neanderthal hips?

Nature is an organism we don't know much about.

A lot of data we collect of wild animals are soiled by our presence and our intervention.

The elephants living in the wild are not living in the wild as before. They are living in an area that in comparison with let's say threehundred years ago, is how many times smaller? Elephants follow extensive trails. How many trails they followed hundreds of years ago are still intact up till now?
All I hear, see and read about elephants is that they are a nuisance, they attack villages, destroy crops...
There's even a study about a certain area where elephants were extremely agressive towards humans. They discovered that some of these elephants once were displaced by humans. They were captured in a place where they were already too many, displaced, and then the problems started in their new environment.
The behaviour of wild elephants is already influenced by the human intervention: decrease of habitat.

In the Netherlands there was last winter a big scandal because at the end of the winter in a natural park a lot of deer died (slowly) of starvation.
'Let's not come in between' was the motto of those who were responsible. 'This is natural' they shouted.
But they forgot one thing : there were no wolves to finish the starving deer off so they died very slowly. They also forgot that the animals couldn't go anywhere else. And they also miscalculated the number of animals fit for the offered space. Those are the people that should know something about nature., but they don't. How in the first place can you introduce deer in a natural park without a natural predator? Beforehand you know already that there never can be a balance.
Then of course, it's easy to say that nature is like this or like that and that it doesn't give a damn about balance.
Many hunters in Europe defend their sport saying they are preserving nature. Breeding pheasants, releasing them afterwards to shoot them. And in between killing foxes because they might eat the pheasants they put to so much effort in to raise. We are preserving nature, they say.

It is known that a male lion kills all the cubs of a previous male when he takes over the female lions. There is no doubt about it. But did the lion male also kill cubs two centuries ago?

We are told that wolves are shy and don't attack human beings. That they have been demonised in the past centuries for no reason.
I think wolves did attack human beings in the past. They would attack, kill and eat a poor ambulant merchant in the middle ages who slept the night before in a stable with sheep.
But what wolf would like to attack a human smelling of Bosch or Dior, or body lotion? I I would be a wolf, I wouldn't even try.

One can only talk about nature as it was in the past or as it is where there is no human intervention still. Those places are very scarce. Krugerpark is not natural anymore.

It would of course be in our advantage to believe that nature doesn't give a damn either way whether she's stable or not. In believing so, one get's a free ticket to continue discarting nature. Discarting means ignoring it and destroying it.

The floods in Pakistan or mudslides in Latin-America and elsewhere are no unstability of nature. On the contrary, nature is simply restoring stability where there was a disturbance. All we do is being angry and we deplore the human victims. That 's all we can think of.

I understand your point of view, but I don't agree because of the things I mentioned above. I suspect it's much more complicated than we can imagine.

Nature is a collection of organisms and systems that we know a LOT about. I don't know where you come up with your assumptions, but they are inaccurate and unsupported.

I think you need to rethink your perspective on things.

manono, We now have information about DNA which provides us with many things including the migration of humans from Africa to spread around this world. Biological science now provides us with many cures for disease. You also need to study a bit about evolution and survival, and how the landmass of this planet changed dramatically from one land that concentrated in the north pole side of this planet. We also know that this planet has gone through two ice ages, and that this planet is some 4.5 billion years old.

I suggest you do some studying before posting on topics you have little or no knowledge. a2k is a good source for information, but most of us use it for entertainment and education.

"Yes, of course it's relative, which is why i found your comment meaningless. "

I'm dumbfounded. You said,

"We didn't evolve very quickly."

So you're saying your own statement, the one I originally took issue with, is meaningless. I suggest you stop saying things you consider meaningless, I guess.

"There have been significant changes in species which have been noted in the lifetimes of humans--the moths around Manchester, England come to mind."

So basically you're telling me these biologists don't know their own field of study? Can't tell the difference between quick adaptation and slow adaptation?

"To assume that evolution always selects properly for the most efficacious trait is to badly misunderstand the process."

Sigh. This is not looking good from the perspective of debate integrity.
This is quite true, so it's good that I assumed no such thing.

What does make the difference, then?

I'm going to have a very hard time being convinced women have large hips for any reason other than our babies' large heads.

If you're talking about great ice ages, there've been three in the last 500 million years. We're in one now.

What he said was pretty much true, though. It's difficult at this point to study a biosphere that hasn't been affected by humans.

Given that at no time did i assert that the statement were meaningful, this objection of yours is meaningless. Your contention about what biologists have to say is meaningless, too, given that it is ipse dixit, and we have no reason to assume that biologists (a sufficiently nebulous grouping--some biologists, most biologists, all biologists?) have said this, or in what context, or in reference to what other possible time frames.

As for rhetorical integrity, you're on very poor ground. You make ex cathedra statements about evolution and what biologists "say," without a shred of supporting evidence. Now, i don't have a really big beef about that sort of thing, given that i had largely done the same. But it bugs the piss out of me when some holier than thou clown then gets in my face about what i've written when there is no more substance to what he has written.

As for what you may or may not have assumed about the process of evolution, you are left with the necessity to explain why you wrote: "Regardless, if the change was no indication of quality, then how on earth did it get selected for?"--which implies that evolutionary change only occurs when there is a certainty of an improvement in "quality" (however the hell you think you'd like to define that). So that's why i wrote: "To assume that evolution always selects properly for the most efficacious trait is to badly misunderstand the process."

It's really a shame when somebody gets in your face about "rhetorical integrity," and yet needs to have things such as that explained.