Hemispherectomy : Understanding the Amazing Brain : The Learning Channel : 1999

[pinkchristianrebel]

This is extremely fascinating! One of the reasons why I'm a psychology major <3

[beamicus]

Ben Carson is awesome! Such a role model. I just read all his books and I am amazed by his life's story.

[kmsoileau]

Evolution cannot explain the brain's ability to recover from a hemispherectomy. To develop the ability to recover from a particular injury, evolution must be exposed to sufficient number of incidents of the injury over time. The only way an individual could be deprived of the use of an entire hemisphere, and also have the opportunity to pass their genes on, is with brain surgery, which has not been occurring long enough for evolutionary processes to operate.

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau i consider you to be a reliable expert as you've obviously suffered a brain injury of some sort. a serious one.

[kmsoileau]

@huskalope If so, congratulate yourself on being stumped by a question posed by a brain-injured person. LOL

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau i'm not stumped and you didn't ask a question. your statement is akin to 'if birds could fly, they'd go to the moon.' it belies such a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the universe that there is no intelligent rebuttal to it any more than there's an intelligent rebuttal to a Ke$ha song. I'm just sorry your science teacher failed you so thoroughly when you were in school.

[kmsoileau]

@huskalope If you knew the answer you would have stated it, instead you haven't got the faintest f*cking idea how to address the question, so you pretend it's meaningless. Have a moronic, day, Forrest!

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau "Have a moronic, day, Forrest!"

i'm having at least one of those three things.

that said, once again, i will fully admit that i have no idea how to address the statement that you seem hell-bent on referring to as a question, despite the fact that there's no actual inquiry in it, just an inaccurate statement of what you believe to be a fact with a smug sense of self-satisfaction. i challenge you to answer this question: "apricot pencil toaster whistle screwdriver staple ham."

[kmsoileau]

@huskalope "inaccurate statement of what you believe to be a fact" By all means, point to my inaccuracy. Your insults only testify to your ignorance.

[kmsoileau]

@kmsoileau PS Your string of nouns doesn't form a sentence, much less a question. LOL

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau exactly my point. it's nonsense. how do you respond to it? you're stumped not by way of an intelligent argument, but by way of being presented with something incomprehensible and hard to parse.

the inaccuracy in your statement (not question) is your understanding of evolution - you're arguing against a straw man version of the theory and not the actual, accepted understanding of how it works. i can't argue with it because your entire argument is based on a fallacy.

[kmsoileau]

@huskalope Let me dumb it down for you. It's easy to see how evolution would evolve mechanisms for healing of bruises and cuts because they have occurred millions or billions of times throughout human history so evolution has had time to gradually refine healing of these types of injuries. However, before modern brain surgery, even minor brain injuries were likely to lead to death, so evolution has had much less "room" to operate with regard to evolving effective brain healing.

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau it was dumb enough already, don't worry.

again, you're missing my point entirely, a testament to the sizable gap between your perceived intelligence and the intelligence you actually exhibit. if you look at evolution as an internal process that's purely reactionary, then yes - you would be correct. unfortunately for you, that's not the nature of evolution. your understanding of evolution is wrong, therefore you can't intelligently discuss it.

[kmsoileau]

@huskalope Your "smoke screen" of insults demonstrates your ignorance. You've had several opportunities to enlighten me and others about evolution, and have been asked to point out my specific inaccuracies, yet you didn't. LOL Thanks for the laugh!

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau If you expect me to explain evolution to you in 400 characters, you're a fool. I can't personally correct the reality that you don't understand the underlying concept of what evolution is and therefore feel compelled to build an argument based on a straw man version of it. That's all.

I don't have a horse in this race. If thinking you won an argument via youtube comments on a video with 7,000 views makes you happy, then throw yourself a party. It does not change reality.

[kmsoileau]

@huskalope You've gone from saying my argument makes no sense, then retreated to saying that my argument is inaccurate, then refused to point to even one inaccuracy. You reek of bull$hit. Cheers!

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau i feel like you're imagining a completely different conversation than the one we're having. that may be part of the problem.

as i've stated dozens of times, it's clear you don't understand what evolution is. it's not a reactionary process. sometimes capabilities evolve over time that have no selective advantage. evolution is not a reaction to a series of events, it's the result of selective pressures on a population weeding out specific individuals, and the survivors breeding.

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau capabilities and features evolve even when there is no selective pressure that makes them advantageous. furthermore, you're making assumptions about the structure of the brain (somewhat like the 'irreducible complexity' nonsense your ilk are so fond of) that are most likely untrue. the brain didn't need to evolve a mechanism for surviving a hemispherectomy, it simply needed to evolve a way to create new pathways when old ones were damaged.

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau i'd also like to point out that up until this point it is in fact you who's been very much on the aggressive offensive, and you've been quite quick with the insults despite adding no new information to the conversation yourself. :)

how telling.

[huskalope]

@kmsoileau but in summary, yes. your argument makes no sense. the reason it makes no sense is because it's based on an understanding of evolution that nobody who supports evolution believes in. that is your inaccuracy. no, i don't want to teach you how evolution actually works, that's the job of 9th grade science teachers, and if you didn't understand it then, I'm fairly confident you won't now (due in great part to a dogmatic desire not to do so, intelligence notwithstanding.)

[kmsoileau]

@huskalope Thus it seems rather unlikely that the brain's ability to exhibit such remarkable resiliency to such a major injury, purely due to the process of natural selection.

Sorry about all the words with three or more syllables, Forrest!

[evenros]

That neurosurgeon sounds high xD