Another reason why longstanding ideas should not be above question

Do we find instinct lagging behind apparatus in development, or vice vesa. And where is instinct and problem-solving encoded in these tiny ganglia. How does NDE explain that the disconnect that must exist between 'physchology' and physiology does not yield utter confusion and certain extinction with most novel instincts/behaviors or organs/structures? I'm asking because I don not know how this is explained. kvwells

"So one must wonder how how, according to Darwinian Evolution, the mind ever developed to create “inventive constructions” that are then projected into the world. It seems that the point is not just that we have no reason to believe that our view of the world is actually accurate, or that what is out there fits our beliefs of what is out there. The incomprehensible thing is that the mind, while taking in perceptions such as sight, sounds, touch, etc, could somehow develop the ability to then create “schemas” on how we think about these things. It is not so much that, once developed, it would not be eligible for natural selection, as the Evolutionary Psychologist will quickly point out. Rather, it is how in the world could this ability possibly develop through random mutations?" Agreed. I'm sure, however, that the evolutionary psychologist would present the usual hand-waving argument that "inventiveness" is some sort of survival strategy, and just leave it at that. When I first started to study the issue of origins, I was interested to learn that some of the strongest criticisms against Darwin came from linguists (then called "philologists") such as Max Muller, who apparently told Darwin that he would never be convinced that man's mind evolved from the animal mind. There are some very odd things about language that cannot be explained by the RM+NS model. First of all, the history of all languages show the same tendency: the farther back we go in time, the more figurative, metaphorical, and poetic the language becomes. At no time in the past was any language a series of atomistic grunts ("caveman-speak") combined with awkward pointing at an object. That never existed. "Figurative" meanings -- like all poetic meaning -- is multivocal, splitting up into separate discrete meanings (at which time they are called "literal") only at a much later point in history (in the West, that point coincided approximately with the "scientific revolution" in thought, and can almost be pinpointed precisely with the writings of Francis Bacon and Galileo). Second of all -- and related to the first point above -- all languages apparently show an odd evolution of combining BOTH a concept of consciousness and a concept of matter together in one idea, one word, undifferentiated -- as if those in antiquity did not split up their experience into a clearly defined "inner" and "outer." For example, we have today words like "soul" and "wind." The first pertains to an inner experience; the second, to an outer physical movement of the atmosphere. If we trace the meanings of these words back in time, we come to the single Latin term for both: "spiritus". Our mental term "conceive" also originally contained within it the physical action of "pressing something out." Moral terms also show this tendency. "Right" also meant "straight" and "wrong" meant "sour" or "twisted." Anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries knew about this of course and had a curious interpretation of it. For them, current literal meanings of words are the only "true", "correct", and "objective" meanings. And since, in Darwinian models, the physical world appeared first and slowly evolved into a mental one, they had no trouble in imagining a Great Poetic Age of man, in which literal meanings for physical things (which, again, must have come first in their schema) were "carried over" by means of metaphor into an evolving, burgeoning, inner world that we call "subjective experience." In other words, their timeline runs thus: Caveman grunts and groans and pointing at clearly perceived physical objects -- Great Poetic Age whence they took these literal meanings of physical things and used them as metaphors to describe a newly felt inner, subjective experience -- The Great Literal Age when there were now two kingdoms, mental and physical, each with its own vocabulary. Like most Darwinian models, this is sheer fantasy. There is no evidence for "caveman-speak" nor for a Great Poetic Age of Metaphor. The most we can say is this: in its infancy, language (or rather, the users of language) did NOT perceive or recognize any split between inner and outer, mental and physical. That split came later. One final thought. There are many things about perception that cannot be easily explained by RM+NS. A few years ago I was reading up on a famous experiment done by Edwin Land, a physicist who also happened to invent the polaroid process in photography. The experiment first appeared in two parts in PNAS and was later summarized in a more popular article in Scientific American (around 1958). Land was able to generate a full-color projected image on a screen from two black-and-white slides. The color was not in the slides, it was not in the light (which was monochromatic) and it was not an illusion, since the projected image had been photographed and stuck on the cover of Scientific American. He developed his observations into a theory of color perception that he called the "Retinex" theory. His explanation: Older theories of color perception assumed that color is reducible to wavelength. When light of short wavelength is perceived by certain cones in the retina, we experience "blue,"; when the cones receive long wavelength, we experience "red," etc. It turns out that this is only a gross approximation and is true only in certain cases (as his experiment showed). The perceiving organ, in his view, was not the eye per se, but rather a psycho-physical organ that he called the "retinex" comprising eye+retina+cortex. The retina does not passively receive wavelengths and then pass them on to the optic nerve; it actually (and actively) processes the electromagnetic information by sorting it into ratios -- it calculates, essentially -- and what it sends to the optic nerve is the ratio -- a number. When the cortex receives the number, it experiences the color. As long as the ratio is the same -- regardless of the original numbers involved -- the brain will experience the same color. Hence, the ability to see "blue" and "red" in a projected image where there is no blue or red dye in a slide or blue or red wavelength in the projector light. In his Scientific American article, Land slyly makes the point that it is "almost impossible to believe" that the eye could have randomly evolved to make these sorts of calculations and to do them, essentially, instantly. I remember sending off an email to Michael Behe about Land's work. He replied that he personally didn't know all that much about perception but that he could see how all of this would fly in the face of neo-Darwinist explanation. filmGrain

I could have told you things less evolved than mammals show emotion and curiosity. My wife and I keep sea horses and they are incredibly inquisitive creatures. And they are fish. Jason jwrennie

Ekstasis, You said "But I am fully confident that this will not slow the Darwinian Evolutionists even by a nanosecond. After all, they have all-purpose and all-powerful tools at their disposal, nothing that their schema and inventive construction can’t handle!!" Your forgot the most important tool of the Darwinist, imagination. Only in NDE is imagination or one's fantasies considered evidence for a theory. jerry

filmGrain, So one must wonder how how, according to Darwinian Evolution, the mind ever developed to create "inventive constructions" that are then projected into the world. It seems that the point is not just that we have no reason to believe that our view of the world is actually accurate, or that what is out there fits our beliefs of what is out there. The incomprehensible thing is that the mind, while taking in perceptions such as sight, sounds, touch, etc, could somehow develop the ability to then create "schemas" on how we think about these things. It is not so much that, once developed, it would not be eligible for natural selection, as the Evolutionary Psychologist will quickly point out. Rather, it is how in the world could this ability possibly develop through random mutations? No, this is way beyond stimulus-response, which could at least conceivably develop. And how does one attach meaning to such schemas and inventive constructions? In other words, using the prevailing schema, there must be an interpreter for computer code, a recognized language. And how would the newly mutated mind interpret and then use these thoughts that do not correspond to any concrete object? And how are the schemas possibly represented by molecules in motion in the brain? Wow, the whole concept appears staggering. But I am fully confident that this will not slow the Darwinian Evolutionists even by a nanosecond. After all, they have all-purpose and all-powerful tools at their disposal, nothing that their schema and inventive construction can't handle!! Ekstasis

“Today the language and modes of thought of computing dominate the biological sciences. One speaks of behavior as being genetically “programmed” or “hard-wired,” and of a brain’s “processing power,” of “integrating” information in “real time.” We are perhaps not always aware that we do this. When you think in terms of a particular scheme, you can begin seeing it where it isn’t, begin projecting it onto the world. “ All thinking is done in terms of a particular scheme and all meaning is projected into the world. We have no choice but to do that since that is how meaning and language operate. The psychologist J.M. Baldwin wrote: “The development of thought . . . is by a method essentially of trial and error, of experimentation, of the use of meanings as worth more than they are as yet recognized to be worth. The individual must use his own thoughts, his established knowledge, his established judgments, for the embodiment of his new inventive constructions. He erects his thought as we say ‘schematically’ . . . projecting into the world an opinion still peculiar to himself as if it were true. Thus all discovery proceeds.” [“Thoughts and Things”, J.M. Baldwin] filmGrain

This reminds me of one of Fred Reed's (a known critic of Darwinism, if not a full-throated ID supporter) columns, "Thoughts on Hornets": http://fredoneverything.net/Hornets.shtml Quote: "Today the language and modes of thought of computing dominate the biological sciences. One speaks of behavior as being genetically “programmed” or “hard-wired,” and of a brain’s “processing power,” of “integrating” information in “real time.” We are perhaps not always aware that we do this. When you think in terms of a particular scheme, you can begin seeing it where it isn’t, begin projecting it onto the world. " jimbo

I can tell you from experience that Gators display most of their emotion on Game Days... :) todd