By FRANS de WAAL on animal cognition (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 14:52 (2927 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You always dwell on nature's pressures, even though you recognize that nature did not require any advance beyond bacteria. EVERY innovation is therefore the result of a drive towards improvement, while the continuity you recognize can also be found in the progress made from apelike progenitors to primitive cavemen to hunters in the jungle to farmers on the land to artists in attics to businessmen in skyscrapers and to philosophers on the internet. - DAVID: Thank you for making my point. There is a drive to complexity which appears to exist in the evolutionary mechanism for no good reason! Where does it come from, naturally?
Answer, it is not natural. - Why is it unnatural for living organisms to wish to stay alive, or to find new ways of exploiting the conditions under which they live? We humans take this for granted, but some humans believe that only large organisms think this way.