Clever Corvids: unique beaks for tool use (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 19, 2016, 12:54 (3171 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: To say that crows are intelligent enough to use tools is not an anthropomorphization! How does any innovation catch on? Do you think your God preprogrammed every Caledonian crow to suddenly start using tools? Organisms can learn from other organisms, and in due course new behaviour may also lead to physical adaptations. Why did it appear? What you call the innate drive to complexity is what I call the drive for survival and improvement. -DAVID: You haven't answered my point. How does one crow show the others so they all learn the tricks? Is it monkey see monkey do, which works because they live in troops? The crows on my ranch fly around by themselves, unless fighting, which they do regularly. In your evolution-dependent view we probably got to be warlike from them, since you think humans inherited all their emotions from lesser organisms.-I wrote “organisms can learn from other organisms”. Of course other crows can see what the inventor did. Do you think they're blind until they start fighting? And the inventor can teach his/her offspring to do it too, and in due course more and more crows will catch on and specific adaptations will take place (as with Darwin's finches). It doesn't have to happen overnight. Now perhaps you'll answer the question I asked you: “Do you think your God preprogrammed every Caledonian crow to suddenly start using tools?” As for war, you yourself have frequently quoted Tennyson's “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, and you know as well as I do that conflict is every bit as common throughout the natural world as cooperation. And yes, I believe we inherited aggression, greed, territorialism from our fellow animals, just as we inherited parental love, social structures, and the need to explore.