Animal Minds; how much can we learn about them? (Animals)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, December 14, 2015, 16:01 (3266 days ago) @ dhw

You are asking some highly pertinent questions. The bottom line is that we do not understand the need for such a complex nest. That is the perfect image for the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution. Why is it illogical for the weaverbird to build such an unnecessarily complicated nest, and yet logical if your God designed it (even though his purpose was to produce humans)? The simplest logical answer is that organisms do their own thing, and it is their particular type of intelligence that enables them to do it in their particular (in this case very complicated) way.-Why can't the explanation be simply that weaver birds are subject to not just genetic and epigenetic evolution, but behavioral evolution as well? If we start with the assumption that the weaving is behavior that is picked up on by birds watching other birds, it is a fact that if bird A watches bird B build the nest with some quirk, that the quirk would at least be partially copied? How many several such quirks--and copying mistakes--would it take to have a nest design that is overcomplicated? To me, at best you could say that a God gave weaver birds the intelligence to be subject to behavioral evolution, but to go beyond that is borderline determinism. -And to play devil's advocate, how much intelligence is really in copying behavior anyway?-There's no need here for an assumption that the plan for the weaverbird's nest is somehow embedded in the first ever living thing. In fact, if you're not careful here about how you define how this information is stored, we can disprove the idea.

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