Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 01, 2016, 22:50 (3031 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: We see it all the time, in the way animals, birds, insects solve problems, adjust to new environments, work out strategies. Every time they do this (and you have offered us hundreds of examples down through the years), you are forced to comment on the ingenuity of your God's thinking, because you don't believe these organisms have the intelligence to work things out for themselves. -I have not reported major animal adjustments as you state. As an example, the Reznick guppies changed size, but the species stayed the same. These are epigenetic adaptations, nothing more. You are overstating problem solving. Clever corvids use tools, but are still crows. So do chimps, and they remain chimps. These animals have a minor degree of consciousness for these events to happen.-> dhw: That is why you keep tying yourself in knots trying to reconcile God's special designs for birds and spiders and wasps and jellyfish with the higgledy-piggledy bush and your anthropocentric vision of evolution.-I am not in knots, as the authors of "Nature's IQ" point out. 
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> dhw: “Guided” can only involve specific implanted instructions or personal tuition, which makes the weaverbird as worthy of your God's attentions as us humans. Unless...as above. Each extinction runs counter to your idea that the balance of nature is “for everyone”. It‘s obviously not for the organisms that go extinct.-When the dinosaurs were wiped out, the balance of nature kept going and, mirabile dictu, little mammals, who had been hanging around developed into all the mammals we have today, including us. Nature's balance shifted but stayed balanced. Only humans have tend to unbalance it by interfering with its automatic adjustments.