Birds, it turns out, have brains structured more like those of mammals than previously realized. That may shed light on the fact that some birds are as smart as some primates.
Then the story falls captive to naturalism and begins to fall apart: For example, with this claim, “Over time, more and more of these supposed pillars of human exceptionalism have fallen. Nieder et al. now argue that the relationship between consciousness and a standard cerebral cortex is another fallen pillar (see the Perspective by Herculano-Houzel).” From Mind Matters News:
Stripped of the rhetoric about supposedly fallen “pillars of human exceptionalism,” the researchers found a neuronal response in carrion crows that “might be a broad marker” for consciousness.
Well, sure, it might. But before we get carried away, the consciousness we should know the most about is human consciousness, which remains almost a complete mystery to us, despite much research. Many elements of brain organization in humans and birds may turn out to be correlates of consciousness. But the treatment of the question here has far more to do with a myth—that science is showing that human consciousness is not exceptional—than it does with unraveling the mystery of human or corvid consciousness.
That said, one science writer offers an interesting tidbit that impacts the current Darwinian theory of evolution:
“The broader, speculative implication of the research is that the last common ancestor of birds and mammals, which existed 320 million years ago, may also have had the same cognitive machinery and thus been similarly capable of formidable thinking abilities. – Ross Pomeroy, “Newly Discovered Brain Structure May Grant Birds Impressive Intelligence.” at RealClearScience“
His proposed new estimate greatly shortens the amount of time available for natural selection acting on random mutation to produce intelligence. Not surprisingly, evolution theory is currently undergoing considerable revision just now, on account of many similar issues.
Denyse O’Leary, “Why does science embrace the “talking animals” myth?” at Mind Matters News
Attempts to undermine respect for human intelligence based on recent findings about bird intelligence are ridiculous compared to our ancestors’ smart bird folklore.
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The real reason why only human beings speak. Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly.
and
In what ways are cats intelligent? It’s hard to come up with an interspecies IQ test. We live in a world where dogs are smarter than wolves in some ways but wolves are smarter than dogs in others. So much depends on what we want to measure. So let’s look at cats in relation to dogs because dogs have been studied so much more.
I really hate this type of science
Because of the inherent hypocrisy that is ALWAYS ignored
The writers always scream “look at my new discovery, animals are much smarter than we thought and we’re not as smart as we thought, we did this with science!”
And there is how we become so stupid
It’s not that the animal walked up and let us know.
NOPE!
It’s literally never that
Is it the fact that we found that it was doing something almost the same as us or did it try to communicate with us.
NOPE!
Through the use of science and human ingenuity we discovered that a part of their brain is very similar to a part in ours
That they have similarities which we stretch to try to connect the dots
Much of their science is geewhiz science
As the above picture shows we have known these animals to be intelligent for quite some time, ya know thousands of years or so.
But while she types on her iPhone
To debunk the human myth that humans are smarter than everything else because she made a discovery using human science that these animals are intelligent
Never once does it cross her mind that no other species on the planet uses science or the iPhone that no other species would be able to understand
Never once
And this is why she is stupid, plain stupid, because she is staring so deeply at the smallest structure of this animals brain that is SO similar to our own that she misses the painfully obvious fact that we were the ones that came to this conclusion using science and that this conclusion IS ONLY important to us and NOT the animals she has studied
And why does it not matter to the bird. Because it can’t perceive our concept of intelligence and why it matters to us all
I’m sure the bird thinks it was created in the image of God which is really that motivating force behind this crap science
Animals are intelligent, but not like us. Anyways I’m off the ask their super duper intelligent bird about crispr and see what insight it can shed of quantum physics
And now is when Mr. Crow amazes us with its construction of modus tollens.
Oh, wait…
Naturalism is kindergarten philosophy. Not to be taken seriously by rational people. Not even in a million years. 🙂
Animals are conscious! In other news, sky is blue, water wet
The attack on human exceptionalism, i.e. the attack by Atheists on the specific belief that we are ‘made in the image of God’ is twofold.
First, Atheists appeal to the Copernican Principle and/or the Principle of Mediocrity, to argue that we are not special in the universe. And secondly, atheists appeal to Darwinian evolution to argue that we are not all that different from animals here on earth and therefore we are not made in the image of God.
This morning, I addressed the fact that the Copernican Principle and/or the Principle of Mediocrity has now been overturned by our most powerful theories in science, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Since the Copernican Principle was addressed this morning and shown to be a false assumption, now I will focus on the atheist’s false narrative of human evolution.
First, the fossil record. In dismantling the supposed fossil evidence for human evolution, it it first important to point out that the entire fossil record is contrary to the gradualism that Charles Darwin himself predicted. Instead of a gradual unfolding of life we find, instead, that the fossil record reveals a pattern of sudden appearance and stasis. That is to say that the entire fossil record, from the Cambrian explosion onward, reveals a pattern of discontinuity rather than the pattern of gradualism that Darwin himself had predicted.
The reason I pointed out that the entire fossil record is contrary to what Darwin predicted is that, if there actually were fossils that documented human evolution, then that supposed fossil evidence for human evolution would be an anomaly that ran contrary to the rest of the fossil record.
And although Atheists fight tooth and nail claiming that the fossil record for human evolution is undeniable, the fact of the matter is that the fossil record for human evolution is not nearly as persuasive as Atheists pretend that it is.
Back in 2012, Casey Luskin did an in-depth dive on the primary literature and found that, “the record reveals a dramatic discontinuity between ape-like and human-like fossils.”
Likewise, in 2017 Dr. John Sanford and Chris Rupe released a book entitled ‘Contested Bones’ after they had spent “four years carefully examining the scientific literature on this subject.’
In their four years of carefully examining the scientific literature they found that “the general public has been deceived regarding the credibility and significance of the reputed hominin fossils” and also that “the hominin bones do not reveal a continuous upward progression from ape to man, but rather reveal a clear separation between the human type and the ape type.”
Moreover, Humans have very many unique phenotypic traits that are simply completely missing in great apes.
Thus the supposed fossil evidence for human evolution is certainly not as ‘slam-dunk’ as Atheists try and pretend that it is.
Secondly the genetic evidence.
According to a Darwinist, the 98.5% Chimp-Human DNA similarity comparison, because of the fraudulent way in which it was derived, “needs to be treated like nuclear waste: bury it safely and forget about it for a million years”,,,
A more reliable estimate for percent genetic similarity between humans and apes is turning out to be around 85%:
Someone might be inclined to say, ‘Hey, 85% is still a pretty high level of genetic similarity and therefore humans could still have possibly evolved from apes.’ But that argument falls apart when we realize that, completely contrary to Darwinian thinking, kangaroos and dolphins are found to be far more genetically similar to humans than Darwinists had originally presupposed that they would be.
In fact, where we find the greatest differences between humans, chimps, kangaroos, dolphins, etc.. etc.. is not in the DNA sequences but is in the ‘species-specific’ alternative splicing patterns between the different species. As the following article states, “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,”
In fact, “Alternatively spliced isoforms of proteins exhibit strikingly different interaction profiles and thus, in the context of global interactome networks, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,, and,,, As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes,, collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification.”
To say that the preceding findings present a problem for the gene-centric view of Darwinists is to make a severe understatement. This finding is a straight-up empirical falsification of their foundational gene-centric assumption.
Moreover, even if the genetic similarity between humans and apes were as close as Darwinists had falsely claimed it to be for all those years, i.e. 98.5%, it still would not alleviate the fact, as Stephen Meyer pointed out, “you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan.
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no clue how any organism might achieve its basic biological form:
In fact, with the recent inclusion of Godel’s incompleteness theorem into physics, it is now known that Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply will NEVER have an answer to the problem of biological form.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
And although the purported scientific evidence from the fossil record and genetics, for the supposed continuity between chimps and humans, if far more discontinuous than Darwinists falsely imagines it to be, it is our ability to think abstractly that most drastically separates us from the great apes.
As Dr. Egnor remarked, “It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes. It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses.”
Moreover, even leading Darwinists themselves admit that they have no clue how language, (i.e. our ability to communicate abstract thoughts to one another), could have possibly evolved:
In 2014 a group of leading evolutionary scientists stated that, after 4 decades of intense research, they have “essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,”
And as the following 2019 article states, “There is no evidence that great apes, however sophisticated, have any of the crucial distinguishing features of language and ample evidence that they do not. Claims made in favor of their semantic powers, we might observe, are wrong.”
The late best selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by the honest confession by leading Darwinists in 2014 that he wrote a book on the subject., “The Kingdom of Speech”,,
In his book he argued,
In other words, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and also to, specifically, infuse information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, basic survival in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, and also for our pleasure.
And although the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, that allowed humans to become ‘masters of the planet’, was rather crude to begin with, (i.e. spears, arrows, and plows etc..), this top down infusion of immaterial information into material substrates has become much more impressive over the last half century or so.
Specifically, the ‘top-down’ infusion of mathematical and/or logical information into material substrates lies at the very basis of many, if not all, of man’s most stunning, almost miraculous, technological advances in recent decades.
For instance,
What is more interesting still about the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information, and have come to dominate the world through the ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself, are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
As Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and who is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states that,
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our ability infuse information into material substrates.
Perhaps a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
And that just so happens to be precisely the proof claimed within Christianity.