It is here proposed that the evolution of life was destined to produce self consciousness out of physical matter just as surely as self-consciousness is destined to be produced by the build up of matter from the human zygote.
Our external vantage point allows us to see the process whereby an individual human matures from the point of conception We are in a position to witness all the stages in the life of individual humans. Activities such as birth, death, growth and decay go on all around us. Conversely on the grand scale of things, taking life as a whole, we are in the middle of evolving life and so we don’t have an overall, clear picture of the process.
In this video Sean B. Carroll states that:
…living things are occupying a planet whose surface is always changing. Hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tectonic movement, ice ages, climate changes whether local or global, all of these keep changing the environments that species are in, they are running to keep up and most of the time they fail. So we have to think about earth’s history to understand life’s history. We have to understand what’s going on at any particular place to appreciate what’s going on with any particular species.
The same could be said for the cells in your body. Their environment is always changing and most of them do not survive as you change from embryo to adult. From an individual cell’s point of view there may not seem to be any direction.Some live some die, some change slowly, others change dramatically. But from the higher perspective of the whole body there certainly is direction.
It must be acknowledged that vertebrates evolve at the different rates. Coelacanths have been around for hundreds of millions of years. When animals within a group are compared, the ones that are deemed to be the most primitive are those that retain characteristics from the node of the group’s branch. So among vertebrates coelacanths are considered more primitive than humans even taking into account that they have had the same amount of time for their evolution.
Rational Wiki explains that:
Biologists have evidence that all life developed from a common ancestor that lived just under 4 billion years ago, and the concept is accepted by virtually all scientists working in the field.
If that is true then every single tetrapod alive today has an unbroken ancestry dating back to this common ancestor. Every amniote can trace their ancestry from a water existence to organisms that first set foot on the land, to fully air breathing, but still exothermic, organisms, and finally on to endothermic mammals and birds. At each stage these animals have become more detached from the external environment. I hope the following points will make this clear.
If we follow tetrapod evolution there is a progression from external to internal fertilisation, from eggs deposited in the environment to eggs protected from the environment by an outer shell and then on to gestation within the mother. Even after birth mammals do not take their sustenance directly from the environment but from the mammary glands of the mother.
And humans generally are not content to eat food taken directly from nature. It is altered by extracting, mixing, cooking and preparing so that much of the time the consumer does not even know where it originated.
We aim to nullify the effects of weather and seasons by the use of suitable clothing, We are able to eat food that is out of season by having it transported round the world or by preserving it, or dehydrating it or freezing it. We do not depend on the seasons for procreation and we are able assist conception when it doesn’t occur naturally. All of this serves to detach us more and more from our surrounding environment. Some people are not happy about this detachment and so they call for us to “get back to nature”.
But this separation is necessary for self consciousness to develop. An organism that does not feel itself to be outside of nature cannot have self consciousness.
There must be a feeling of “me in here against nature out there”. We humans are unique in considering our activities as contrasting with the natural world. We contrast natural with artificial. No other animal has separated itself from nature to the extent that humans have.
Humans can trace their ancestry back through reptile-like, amphibian-like and fish-like conditions, the latter three have obviously remained at an earlier condition than humans. This does not mean that they haven’t evolved since the split with the ancestors of humans. After all there are a multitude of ways of being a reptile, an amphibian or a fish. It just means that they haven’t grown out of the environment they find themselves in to the extent that humans have.
This separation from the environment can even be observed in each individual human looking from toe to top. We can be said to have our feet planted firmly on the earth. Gravity holds us to the earth and our legs support our weight and allow us to move about. Our arms are freed from this task and using the marvelous structures at the ends of them we can create out of the substances of the earth. Gravity plays a lesser part in their activities. Moving on up our brains, being suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, are even more free from earths gravity. Using our brains we create, not from the substances of the earth but out of our inner selves. Being encased in the skull separates our brains even more from the external environment.
Using our hands we mould earthly substance, using our brains we mould thoughts.
Evolution is a creative process and it has turned creatures into creators.
And cheesemakers mould mold for a living.
Not really sure how brains are freed from earth’s gravity. They can fall pretty fast off of a cliff, not doing so well when stopped by rocks and skull at the bottom.
Why should they?
Glen Davidson
Charlie, clarity of concept and explanation are clearly beyond you. What we have instead is a screed of obscurantist poetry. Or perhaps you just feel that’s a superior way to communicate. If so, you are incorrect.
But once again you trace the lineage leading up to a single species, yours, and claim it’s the inevitable and chief product of evolution. You’ve done this many times now, and I’ve tried to point that out as many times. Your blinders are showing.
Nor have you ever managed even to hint at what sort of mechanisms you think are behind this supposed march of progress. Perhaps that could be the next step?
I’ve never heard it reported that a brain has fallen off a cliff, but I’ve heard plenty of reports of it happening to individual people. Brains are protected by being inside the skull of an individual, but individuals can provide only so much protection.
I wrote:
Exactly, why should any successful organism need to evolve past the stage they are obviously making a good living out of?
You mean their brains were left behind when they fell?
I suppose brains being freed from gravity does have its down side.
Glen Davidson
There are so many errors and omissions here that it is hard to know where to begin (or where to stop).
Here is one example:
This is a massive error that conflates food consumption in highly technologized, heavily industrialized societies with “humans” as such. I am fairly confident that if you were to interview people who were eating a traditionally prepared meal in Thailand or Ethiopia, there would know exactly which of their animals they were eating, where that animal came from, which fields the rice or corn came from, and so on.
Another mistake worth pointing out: though it is true that hominid self-consciousness depends on the complex intersubjectivity facilitated by language and culture, it is not as if we evolved language and culture in order to become self-conscious. Self-consciousness could be a spandrel, for all we know — though a very curious spandrel, namely a cognitive spandrel that prevents one from understanding it as a spandrel.
More generally, there’s a lot of conflating of conflation of necessity and contingency in this post, which arises from conflating teleological and non-teleological processes. Development is a teleological process, but one cannot infer, from the fact that development is a teleological process, that evolution is also a teleological process.
The reason for this is quite simple: development happens at the level of individual organisms, and evolution happens at the level of populations of organisms. It is a straightforward category error to ascribe to a population (or a lineage across populations), as a whole, properties that belong to each of its members.
Also, just FYI: all vertebrate brains are contained in cerebrospinal fluid. Not just humans.
Dare I mention that all the cells in your body are clones of one original cell? What does it mean that some do not survive? You are still basically a single celled organism that diversifies.
Slime mold with big ideas.
Glen Davidson
This has been pointed out several times, forcefully. There simply IS NO ANALOGY between individual development and the evolution of populations. They are different in every respect — not even particularly relevant respects, but ALL respects. How Charlie can confuse the development of a single individual organism with differential reproductive rates from one generation to the next within populations mystifies us all.
I haven’t just traced a line to a single species, I’ve traced a line to all mammals and birds. And you have never given me details of what you think the differences would be between, amphibians and the common ancestor to mammals compared with mammals and the common ancestor with amphibians.
I’ll leave reptiles out as you probably don’t consider them a recognised group.
In other words I am asking you to give us specific examples of the way in which you think amphibians have changed the most since the split to see how it compares with how mammals have changed since the split. Are you willing to do this?
I haven’t given you any mechanisms because mechanisms have to do with human constructed machines. We get a false idea of evolution by using machine metaphors. I view evolution as a process whereby organisms express the archetype. But I don’t think you are willing to consider that way of thinking.
It’s not a “way of thinking”, it’s simply a howling blunder in light of all available evidence. However, I will agree that ignoring evidence in favor of incorrect preference, and doing it despite all efforts at education, probably qualifies as a “way of thinking” in much the way Alzheimer’s does.
Not unless you can provide a justified reason to consider that way of thinking.
It isn’t that we’re forbidden to think that way, it’s that we really don’t find evidence-free, amorphous, and useless presumption to be worthwhile, unless one finds it entertaining.
Glen Davidson
I can never quite get how (the equivalent of) “You’re not willing to think badly” is supposed to be an indictment by those not thinking well.
Except, I guess, it’s because they’re not thinking well.
Glen Davidson
Well, if we were willing to consider that way of thinking, and base a scientific research program, we might submit a grant proposal to go find the archetype, see what it looks like, and how it influences the evolving organism. So where do you expect it to be? In the organism? Or outside, perhaps in the cloud? Does the organism’s genome keep checking against it as the lineage evolves? Can we find the molecular details of the checking mechanism? That would be a great discovery if found.
CharlieM,
Haha! You see? You see? Analogies!
I can consider it, but it only takes a few moments’ thought to dismiss it. Since lineages appear to change continously, there appears to be no archetype. I’d say people only even think there are archetypes because, at a moment in time (extended for the years of their life perhaps: a geological ‘moment’), there is an illusion of discontinuity between populations, because we cannot extend the temporal dimension and resurrect the intervenng individuals
I had an extended discussion with fifthmonarchyman on this; it was just weird.
Mayr called it essentialism.
I call it bullshit.
I did not say that brains were free from gravity, My meaning was clear. By being suspended in cerebrospinal fluid they are more free from the effects of gravity than legs are. Do you disagree?
That’s disingenuous. You have picked mammals and birds because they share some of the characters you like because you have them. And they don’t even share all of them, i.e. that bit about technology and processed food. How many species cook their food? Nope, you’re constructing a linear ladder of life, leading to you.
I have, but I’ll do it again. Amphibians are a diverse group, and many of the differences have happened since the three major clades diverged, so I’ll mention them separately. Given that I suspect you don’t like the idea of junk DNA, I’ll just mention that salamanders have ginormous genomes, dozens of times the size of the human genome; that’s a huge change, and probably more impressive to someone who thinks all that DNA must be doing something important. The rest is frogs, for my convenience; they have scale-less, glandular skin, they have strongly fused axial skeletons, they have added an extra segment to the hind limb, they have tongues that function in prey capture, and some of them reproduce on dry land with direct development, i.e. no tadpole stage. That’s what comes to me off the top of my head.
This notion of a scale of evolutionary advancement colors and distorts all your thinking, and would do so even if it weren’t linear. Just saying.
You are too hung up on words; by “mechanism” I mean nothing more than “process”. If you like the latter word better, no problem.
Thanks for explaining your idea of process. Unfortunately, I can’t extract any meaning from it. Could you elaborate? What is this archetype? Is there more than one? If so, how many, what are they, and how do you know that? How is the archetype accessed by organisms? What causes them to express it? Are they approaching closer to it? And what does “archetype” have to do with your notions of progress in evolution?
Yeah, I knew what you were getting at, it’s just an incredibly poor way of putting the fact that the brain has the protection of fluid.
And what’s the point anyway? Why not stay in the water to be “weightless” altogether (by use of a swim bladder)? There’s nothing wrong with supporting oneself using legs, while brains just have the kind of support that works for them.
It’s your whole approach that is biased toward teleology and that leads you to weird and meaningless claims like that the brain is “even more free of earth’s gravity.” It’s neither relevant nor correct.
Glen Davidson
I don’t have to go back much more than a century to find “scientific” Charlie-thinking among the white European scientists explaining how much more evolutionarily advanced they were than the black African savages. They saw no need to compare themselves with birds or frogs, they could measure important distinctions like cranial sutures, brain size, superior facial bones.
These guys were entirely sincere, as sincere as Charlie. Their superiority to the savages was so obviously biological that it never even occurred to them to question WHETHER their assumed superiority was true, they went directly to trying to describe the mechanisms (or processes) that had this result.
Nor could someone today, if he had the capacity to go back in time, be able to persuade these scientists that their starting assumptions might be incorrect. It would be like trying to get a creationist to question whether there IS a god, before jumping directly to showing what their god designed.
Clearly, the “Way of thinking” proceeds from comfortable axioms not to be examined or even recognized.
Leaving that Great Chain of Being issue aside, we have the issue of how lineages change so as to reflect the “archetype”. Is the archetype stored somewhere? When one reflects it perfectly, can one go on further? Or does change stop?
Is CharlieM talking about natural selection, with fitness declining as one moves away from the archetype? I somehow suspect not.
Archetypes were last in fashion during the mid-1800s, in the hands of Richard Owen, a noted opponent of Darwin’s. As understanding of the workings of cells and of development grew in the late-1800s, mystical forces that move phenotypes toward archetypes fell out of fashion, since there was no mechanism connected with the archetypes. With the 20th century came genetics and much more biochemistry.
So CharlieM, exatcly where in the cell are those archetypes, and how do they influence genetic change?
Consciousness never evolved. We are souls in a body. We are not , or anyone, from a common ancestor. This is a fable and a silly one. Its impossible and unproven.
I wonder, Charlie, is a typical resident of Paris more “advanced” than, say, a typical resident of North Sentinal Island?.
What IS the human “archetype”?
CharlieM
I absolutely disagree!
While the brain is surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid it is not suspended in it. The volume of CSF is about 125-150 ml (1/2-2/3 cup) which is totally insufficient to supply any buoyant force to a organ the side and mass of the brain. The brain is subject to the same effect of gravity as legs.
This is like asking where in the cell is the bioelectic pattern of a frog face that developing frog nerve cells emit between themselves during embryogenesis?
Where is it? i dont see a frog face in those cells. its just chemistry as chemistry does. take that, you creationist!
Felsenstein says: “So CharlieM, exatcly where in the cell are those archetypes, and how do they influence genetic change?”
Seems to me that if the brain case has a volume around 150 ml larger than the brain, then the brain is suspended in cranial fluid.
llanitedave,
Thanks for that link. Fascinating!
This is interesting because you seem to be saying consciousness is the product of physical material structures. A position I would not expect to hear from an ID proponent.
Okay so I overstated the case. I should have qualified that statement with “from my personal experience in the area where I live” or something similar. But you are arguing about degree, you are not arguing that people do not prepare their food before eating it. They go to great lengths to cultivate, harvest and process food to make it palatable. Crop growing is worldwide and there are not many people in the world who would kill an animal and eat it without some sort of preparation.
Where did I say we evolved language and culture in order to become self-conscious? Our culture is as it is because we are self conscious and our language and consciousness go hand in hand. There is nothing wrong with speculating that self-consciousness could be a spandrel, as there is nothing wrong with speculating that it isn’t. What is wrong is disnmissing a viewpoint without even considering it.
Well that is where we differ about what it means to be an organism. In my view when considering some animals it is the group that should be thought of as an individual organism. So a termite or ant colony should be treated as the individual. And as for bacteria I would designate the individual more broadly than that. Your opinion that I am commiting a categorical error is just that, an opinion.
Did I say any different?
The cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is critical in humans because of the positioning of the head due to our upright, bipedal stance and the positioning of the foramen magnum and major blood vessels serving the brain. This from Wikipedia:
If you want to talk about mechanisms, look at our arms and legs with their levers, fulcrums, hinges and other joints. The brain is the complete opposite. It is encased in a protective box, kept as still as possible and has none of the type of moving, mechanical parts associated with the limbs. When did you ever hear of the experts saying they were worried about the effect kicking a ball had on the feet of soccer players? But this is said all the time about heading the ball.
If organisms are one big fortuitous accident then there is no need to consider the differences and similarity between their parts like I am doing. Evolution made us this way and that is just how it is!
Unfortunately there isn’t any such evidence nor is there any way to test the claim. So if it is an accepted claim it is accepted for personal and not scientific reasons.
What available evidence are you talking about? Care to reference it?
Its amazing how clones can look so different from each other.
It means that our form is maintained even although individual cells come and go. Our form transcends the life of the individual cells. What maintains this form?
That is an interesting thought. By “form” I don’t mean something static but rather it is dynamic. The human form is as much the form of a single cell or an embryo, or a child as it is the form of us as an adult. Each of these is just one aspect of the form regarded at one point in time. In reality the form transcends time.
From howstuffworks
there you go. Differential reproduction of brain cells.
Thankyou for your thoughts and questions.
The problem is that you will not find the archetype by using analytical science. It can be found by practicing a Goethean gentle empiricism. I consider this a science because it is a search for truth and meaning, but it is not a science that deals with quantities, it is a qualitive science. So in that sense it compliments analytical science. The only instruments needed are the senses and the thinking human brain.
The archetype cannot be found in space as we experience it. It can only be “seen” by treating time as we would space. Our eyes see objects in space but with our thinking brain we can transcend our separate perceptions and unite them in a whole. This cannot be measured, it can only be experienced. It is not within the organism because the organism as we peceive it is but one aspect of the archetype something like a still image is just one aspect of a movie.
From what you say you are thinking of the archetype as separate from the organism or the genome; it is not. These entities are aspects of the archetype and are only seen as separate because human thinking tears them apart. Human observation separates things which are in reality whole and the human mind can unite them again. We are the only creatures on the planet that understand that life and species and individual organism have biographies. Studying these biographies is a step in the direction of apprehending the archetype.
Your idea of the archetype is of a primal animal of each type from which all others of that type descend. This is not my idea of the archetype.
Of course mammals share characters with me because physically I am a mammal. What I am trying to get you see is that taken objectively mammals and birds have moved further from Gould’s wall than amphibians. And speaking objectively humans have moved the furthest. Many consider the human brain to be the most complex structure in the universe.
From Livescience
I’ll reply to the rest of your post when I have time.
You have never taken anything objectively in any of our discussions here. Once again you place yourself on a pinnacle and are amazed that everything else is below you. Your claim about mammals and birds is unsupported.
The archetype is stored in it’s individual instantiations.
In other news, object-oriented programming is seriously misguided, as there are no actual classes of anything and thus those classes cannot actually be instantiated.
Are you serious?
Alan fox
The brain is ‘bathed’ in and surrounded by CFS but it doesn’t float in it nor is the volume of CFS sufficient to ‘suspend” the brain.
The Wikipedia entry, cited by CharlieM, is repeated in many places but the original source is never cited for that data, i.e., brain is neutrally buoyant due to the CFS surrounding the brain.
Consider a brain, or any other tissue, with a volume of 1200 ml and a specific gravity of 1.05 g/ml. Now take 150 ml of a liquid that has a specific gravity of 1.007g/ml and try to float/suspend the brain in that fluid.
The brain:CFS volume ratio of ~10:1 demonstrates that there is simply not enough fluid of the correct specific gravity to achieve the goal of brain neutral, or near neutral, buoyancy.
If anyone has a source to the original data for the claim of a 3 lb brain with an apparent weight of 25 g in a 150 ml CFS volume I’d love to see it!
BK,
My point was that volume of fluid isn’t an argument against buoyancy. Different densities are.
BK,
Just thinking out loud. I see rat brain tissue has been measured at around 1.04 to 1.05 specific density. If cerebrospinal fluid is 1.01, then an average human brain of around 1.4 kilos would need a force of 40 to 60 grams to stop it from sinking. I’m still not seeing what the volume of fluid has to do with it.
ETA relative density is the preferred term, I see.
Alan Fox,
The volume of CFS fluid has to be large enough to allow the brain to displace a sufficient amount of the volume for neutral buoyancy. For neutral buoyancy the mass of the displaced fluid must equal the mass of the object. The numbers just don’t add up as far as I can see.
I’m imagining the brain in the cranium as a brain-shaped goldfish in a brain-shaped bowl. Make the goldfish bigger until there is only enough room for 150ml of fluid – but the shape of the goldfish and bowl match precisely so the gap between, though small, is all around. Is the goldfish still floating? I say it is.
Bad example. In object oriented languages there typically is some description of the general properties of the class at the top of the hierarchy of subclasses. Thus we might have a class vehicle, and subclasses car and truck. Any instantiation of, say, a car, inherits the properties of vehicle.
In biology there is no outside description, when a new rabbit is born there is no way to have it get the properties of class rabbit.
1) in our example the ‘goldfish’ is sightly negatively buoyant when compared to the CFS via specific gravity.
2) the goldfish is ‘free’ to move anywhere in the bowl while the brain is attached at its base.
proposed simple experiment: make a brine sufficient to float an egg in. Take an aliquot of the brine equivalent to 10% of the eggs volume (med egg volume 44 ml) . Can you float the egg in a 4.4 ml volume of water (equivalent to less than a teaspoon)?
I say that it can’t be done no matter how close a fitting of an egg shaped container you can find to place the egg into since there is insufficient volume of fluid to exert enough buoyant force on the egg to float it.
Sure.
Sure. Though the attachments might provide that 40 – 60 gm of support. 🙂
Say the egg is slightly denser than water. Support it with a measuring device (mini-electronic balance, pressure gauge, whatever) That will register the upward force needed to resist the downward force of the egg due to its slightly higher density than water. What minimum volume of water is needed to maintain that buoyancy. Only enough to completely immerse the egg. If the container is egg-shaped but just large enough to allow the egg not to touch the container or the size of a swimming pool, the measuring device will read the same.
I think, so long as an object is surrounded by fluid, the buoyant force is the same and the volume beyond the surface of the object is irrelevant. A column of water generates pressure in relation to height; the surface area is irrelevant.
This is the point I have been trying to make all along albeit not well.
There is insufficient fluid volume under the egg, or brain, to supply the necessary upward buoyant force. Fluid on the sides or above have no impact on the buoyant force as you noted. This makes the neutral buoyancy of the brain even more problematic since the CFS is distributed all around the brain with only a small portion in a position to provide the upward buoyant force needed achieve neutral or positive buoyancy. If the brain were not anchored it would ‘sink’ to the bottom of the cranium/bowl as the goldfish will in your example.
You still cannot get away from the need to displace an equal mass of fluid to achieve neutral buoyancy which means you need at least 8 times the volume of the CFS as is available.
On rereading my comments, I’m probably as guilty.
What you may be overlooking is the displaced volume. Imagine starting with cranium filled with CSF but no brain. Pop in your brain of around 1400ml volume. How much CSF has to go? 1400ml. The difference in weight is around 50gm.
The interaction between the immersed object and the surrounding fluid is only at the surface of the object. How much additional fluid there is beyond makes no difference.
At neutral buoyancy, no. If denser, yes, to the extent of the difference in weight between the object and the fluid it displaces.
And the brain displaces an equal volume of CSF.
We should probably try it, and see.
It seems to me that something like ice won’t float in a little bit of water in a container that nearly fits the ice, but that’s because the ice rises above the water. But as long as the ice can sink into the water (enough to be buoyant) it’s going to float in any amount of water, because otherwise something less dense than water pushes a more dense liquid from beneath it. That is, water will sink under the ice because it is more dense, hence ice floats, and will in any amount of water that keeps it surrounded by water (except at the top).
So yeah, I think that you’re right, the CSF is going to make the brain nearly neutral, because the brain is immersed in it. Your ship, by contrast, has to displace a lot of water to float, because much of the ship is sticking up above the water.
Glen Davidson
Actually, it might be easier to work with a slightly buoyant object like an ice cube and add weight to get it to just immerse. Would you need to add the same weight whether the surrounding volume was just enough to contain it or was huge. I don’t think there will be a difference. It’s the relative densities of the object and the liquid it displaces that matter.