Natures wonders: ants and other insects farm (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, April 30, 2020, 15:40 (1666 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As usual we are far apart. God helps and the animals do it.

dhw: How do you think God “helps”?

DAVID: Programs their onboard information.

dhw: That’s not “help”, that’s programming, as above in bold.

DAVID: DNA contains information. much of which is God-given.

dhw: So the ants’ invention of farming was thanks to God planting an ant farming programme in their DNA 3.8 billion years ago, alongside the programme for all future life forms and their lifestyles and strategies and natural wonders – but that is called “helping”. Or (there's always hope) do you mean God planted the information which made ants into ants, but he left them to work out their own means of survival, including farming?

DAVID: No hope. IMHO God showed ants how to farm.

dhw: Which means he either programmed ant farming 3.8 billion years ago, or he dabbled – presumably because he’d weakly forgotten to include ant farming in the programme. How else could he have “shown” them?

DAVID: See other discussions re' how God works. He may be hands on all the time. It is all guess work, nothing concrete, as you always try to make it.

The guess that your God gave ants the wherewithal to devise their own farming system is no more concrete than your changing guesses that your God preprogrammed ant farming or dabbled it (= hands on).

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Under "bacterial memory":

DAVID: Usual twist. The article shows exactly what happens physically in the ant membranes, a form of chemical memory, nothing more.

dhw: There are only two ways you can study any living being: 1) the material workings, and 2) the behavioural. How do you know that human memory, storage of information, communication, ability to change behaviour are not “nothing more” than chemical?

DAVID: At the basis they are chemical also, but the use of charged ions is directed into complex networks of axons and changeable dendrites to create human n=mental capacities. The bacterial memory is extremely simple arrangement of ions.

So bacterial intelligence is not as advanced as human intelligence. I think most of us can accept that.

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Under "Negative memory controls"

"'Our findings in worms are a good starting point for further research into the cognitive functions of other animals. We know that Neuromedin U is also found in many other organisms and in the human brain," says Professor Liliane Schoofs. "A good knowledge of these basic mechanisms is, therefore, crucial to better understand the complex processes in the human brain.'"

DAVID:It seems all brains have the same basic properties, but vary greatly in thought capacity as the human brain shows. Communication by ion electric currents is basic to brain processes, but the neurons are also influenced by many different neuropeptides.

Both of the above posts emphasize the material sources of cognition, as indeed do you with your constant references to the thought capacity of the human brain. And all the articles seem to suggest that other life forms have a degree of cognition.