Clever Corvids: unique beaks for tool use (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 20, 2016, 17:41 (3170 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Of course other crows can see what the inventor did. Do you think they're blind until they start fighting? 
DAVID: It is this point that I doubt. The crows I see are solo flyers. No one crow watches another build a nest. - I find it hard to believe that a crow using a stick to obtain its nosh will be unseen by other crows. In any case, there are crows all round where I live, and I see lots of them at a time. Perhaps yours are simply different from ours. I believe some species live in communities of thousands! As for the offspring, you say they would only learn if they “hung around to watch”, but they fly off when they fledge. I don't suppose either of us has a clue how long it takes for a young bird to learn how to grab a twig and forage. - dhw: Now perhaps you'll answer the question I asked you: “Do you think your God preprogrammed every Caledonian crow to suddenly start using tools?”
DAVID: YES - Thank you. Just one more natural wonder to add to the millions preprogrammed in and passed down by those first cells through thousands of millions of years and organisms. - DAVID: “In your evolution-dependent view we probably got to be warlike from them [crows], since you think humans inherited all their emotions from lesser organisms.”

dhw: 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.
DAVID: I think they are parallel developments. Do we have specific genes for greed, aggression, etc.? No. Genes are the tools of evolution. - Evolution is not confined to genes. You have already devoted several threads to the evolution of language, for which there is no known gene. Here we are talking about the evolution of behaviour. All the above behavioural attributes existed in animals that came long before us, and one can link all of them to the drive for survival and/or improvement. If you believe in common descent, you can hardly argue that they are “parallel” developments: they have remained constant right back to whatever ancestry you can think of.