Animal language (Animals)

by David Turell , Friday, January 16, 2015, 00:34 (3598 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: And why the heck would he preprogramme weavers' nests if his aim was to produce humans? Do you honestly believe we could not have existed without them?-I don't know why. I just know we need an enormous variety of life, because that is the result we see. You seem to expect a straight line from protocells of first life to humans with very little branching out in-between. 
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> dhw: What do you mean by “orderly”?-A fairly gradual step forward. Both the Cambrian and our brain were giant leaps compared to evolutionary time from 3.8 billion years ago. Ten million for the Cambrian and six million for our brain.-> dhw: Of course there's a gulf between us and our fellow animals - but you're considering humanity as it is now.....All this because we have an extra degree of intelligence which has enabled our species to develop the resources offered by Nature. -There is no evidence that our brain which appeared about 250,000 years ago was not equal to the one we have now. We simply needed time to learn to use it. Viewed that way we are definitely different in kind.-> 
> dhw: You're right: on a certain epistemological level, we know nothing. Maybe all our fellow creatures are clockwork toys carrying out God's instructions. Indeed, we may be the same. And naturalists who have spent their lives studying animal behaviour are deluded. Strangely, I don't share your agnosticism on this subject. I believe that our fellow animals are intelligent, sentient, creative etc., though generally to a much smaller degree than ourselves.-I would say immensely smaller. The real problem is we are not they. When my dog decides to circle to table to the left instead of the right, to reach me, when both paths are clearly equal and open to him, I can't tell you how or why his brain (mind) made the decision. This is the source of my agnosticism. Is the thinking all veneer or can it be slightly deeper?
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> dhw: The gap is enormous, but as above I see an “orderly” development from animal to so-called primitive to so-called civilized society...[Tony] went on: “perhaps that is what happens when people get too far removed from nature; they start to believe that other life forms are not as valid, precious, or complex as our own.-As an animal owner I agree to a point, but I watch the instinctual behaviors and recognize that Tony's view is also over-humanizing them.-> dhw: I would add that they start to believe the gap is so great that humans are different in “kind” to the animals from which they have descended.-Yes we do.