Ant intelligence (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 06, 2013, 18:56 (3886 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Not thought. Not intelligence. Instinct and automatic responses to stimuli.-dhw; How do you know?-DAVID: Because their patterns of behavior are standardized. No independent variations. For example, every bird nest for a given species is the same.-You've switched from ants to birds, but it makes no difference. If a Martian focused on an old British housing estate and pointed out that the houses were identical, would that mean all the human occupants were robots? We also have standardized patterns of behaviour ... we eat, drink, sleep, have sex, rear our young etc. But within the given parameters we vary from individual to individual. Standardized behaviour does not exclude individual responses to non-standard situations, and those who have studied other forms of animal life are generally able to distinguish one individual from another and even to discern different levels of intelligence. Among many articles we've looked at down through the years have been studies of crows, some of which are astonishingly clever, improvising tools to get at food. They can't all do it. They are individuals, even if they and their nests look the same to us. This becomes all the more apparent, the more closely related we are to our fellow animals. So please try again ... how do you know that insects and birds do not think and have no intelligence?