Smart animals (Animals)

by David Turell , Friday, September 23, 2016, 16:00 (2982 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: The claim that your God taught the weaverbird to make its nest in order to balance nature in order to leave time for humans to evolve strikes me as considerably more “just-so” (fictional) than my Darwinian-type suggestion that an avian tap-dance originated as a way of impressing the female of the species, and survived because it worked. - My point is that the weaver nest construction is so complex it cannot be explained by a just-so story, most of which are feeble attempts to explain evolution. - > DAVID: I like the way you use your agnostic position to blithely drag God in when you need him!
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> dhw: The issue is whether evolution is run by divine preprogramming/dabbling, or by the intelligence of organisms. .... And once more, I have never claimed that early life or cells invented intelligence. - So how did they develop the intelligence you claim they have.
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> DAVID: Advantageous behavior is not a just-so story. It is necessary for life to survive. It is the convoluted contorted explanations of how the behaviour might have developed which are the just-so stories.
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> dhw: However, this is a diversion from the point at issue, which is that choosing whether to switch on God's computer programme giving instructions on how to build a nest is not my idea of the weaverbird working things out for itself. - Understood.