Perhaps This Explains Theism?

[Angrboda]

I don't have time to read the detail tonight, but a couple of questions do come to mind prior to reading it. One is, in what way is this any different than the general principle of "genetic clocks" in which the farther you go away from a species, in terms of last common ancestor, the less genetic material they have in comon; how is this specific marker unique against the general background pattern of diverging genomes. Second, and I'm not asking you, but one thing has bothered me this past year about claims regarding the rapid increase in brain size in the hominids leading up to and including homo sapiens sapiens. The general theory of "intelligence" from what I recall, correlates ratio of the logarithm of the brain volume to the body mass, or some such. I've probably got the formula wrong, but the thrust is that intelligence is a function of a ratio of brain size to body size, not of absolute brain size. Now, it's true that hominid brain size was increasing, but hominid body size was also increasing at the same time, and since relative intelligence is a function of the ratio, you have to adjust for the increase in body size for a realistic appraisal of when our "animal intelligence" was increasing, and by how much. I haven't looked real hard, but I've never encountered any attempt to chart hominid intelligence per this maxim of general animal intelligence. (Which may itself be invalidated by more recent studies in animal intelligence than I've read — I'm not very current on the literature — but I think, at minimum, it would provide a more realistic appraisal of the upcurve of intelligence in the evolution of the hominids.)