Explaining natural wonders (Animals)

by dhw, Sunday, December 04, 2016, 12:31 (2910 days ago) @ dhw

David’s comment (on owls): In evolution was this developed in one step, a saltation, or bit by bit? As usual I suspect saltation, as I don't imagine the owl's tried out different trailing edge alterations which requires figuring out how to develop the proteins to make the fine hairs and develop the mechanisms to produce the hairs, the usual problem of speciation.
And: Evolutionary mechanisms are smarter than we are, so we have to learn from nature to find what works. Not by chance.

QUOTE: (from post on crows and ducks) "Such relational concepts are thought to be only available to highly intelligent animals with a high level of training, and these animals do it in 15 minutes after they come out of the egg.”

David’s comment: Finding this type of recognition ability in birds other than crows is not surprising. The question is how these birds developed the capacity, or was it given by God during evolutionary development.

It’s good to hear that you recognize the intelligence of these birds. Of course it’s not surprising if you accept common descent and the hypothesis that all life forms have inherited their intelligence from the earliest forms and have developed it in countless different ways as the countless different organisms have learned to cope with or exploit the countless different environments.

Here is another example, from a review in The Times of a book called: What a Fish Knows: The Inner lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe. He claims that fish are “conscious and modestly intelligent animals with rich social lives”. They can distinguish individuals, feel pain, enjoy being stroked, and tests on one species (archerfish) showed that they recognized one photograph out of 44 different human faces, while carp could even distinguish between types of music.