Natures wonders: insect migration (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 10, 2021, 11:15 (1077 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your 'ability to interpret' is the author's algorithm.

dhw: […] Thank you.

DAVID: Give an inch and take a mile. I didn't drop the idea of innate algorithms.

dhw: But the author’s algorithm referred only to the ability to interpret, and it takes the bees a week to interpret the dance. What on earth is the point of having an ability to interpret if the perception, information, processing and communication of that information, and the decision-making have already been done for you, and you are merely an automaton that thinks and learns and decides absolutely nothing?

DAVID: The algorithm facilitates all the capacities you list. It takes a developmental week for the algorithm to be available.

Ah well, instead of your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old “programme” for bees and their dance, we now have a much trendier 3.8-billion-year-old “algorithm” (or did he insert it later?), which makes it clear that the ability to interpret is nothing of the sort, because bees and ants have it and yet can do nothing but follow fixed instructions.

Ant bridge algorithm
DAVID: For current food supply each small ecosystem melds into bigger ones so all can eat. Prior systems in the past were present to satisfy your usual compartmentalized-time complaints.

dhw: And those that can’t/couldn’t eat go/went extinct and new ecosystems form/formed and so on for billions of years, and the vast majority had no connection with humans although you insist that they were all “part of the goal of evolving [= designing] humans” and their food. You keep admitting that you have no idea why your God would have chosen such a method to achieve such a purpose, and yet still you go on editing your theory in order to leave out the factors that make it illogical! […]

DAVID: Evolution is a continuum and all parts are necessary for the next stages to appear.

The next stages of what??? You have your God designing every species, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder that ever existed, and the majority of them had no connection with humans and their food! And yet you say that for 3.X thousand million years every stage of every species and its lifestyles etc. was necessary for that one purpose! Please stop hiding behind vague generalizations.

dhw: And now, using your undoubted ability to reason, please explain the difference between the cognitive, sentient, purposeful, sensory, information-processing and decision-making activities of bees and ants – other than time and scale – and our own, bearing in mind that the God-given “algorithm” is the ABILITY to interpret, and not all the individual interpretations of all the individual pieces of information.

DAVID: They have built-in interpretation guidelines.

Which makes total nonsense of your agreement that they have the ability to interpret!

Baby bats learn navigation
QUOTE:: "The young bats would then make a solo trip from the cave mouth to the nursery tree and begin their exploration of the wider world using that tree as a base. This means the pups somehow learn to navigate to their nursery tree while hanging upside down from their mothers, the researchers conclude."

DAVID: more research is needed to see how they learn.

dhw: May I humbly suggest that they learn by observing and memorizing details of their surroundings, just as human children go out with Mummy and Daddy and eventually know which streets lead to their house, and which house is theirs. What’s your theory? That 3.8 billion years ago God preprogrammed bees and their dance, one species of ant and its bridges, and baby bat navigation – or did he pop in and give them private lessons?

DAVID: Their mammalian brains have lots more interpretive ability than bees and ants, obviously.

Firstly, “more ability” concedes that bees and ants have the ability, and secondly finding the way home apparently demands more interpretive ability that finding particular flowers in different locations at different distances as well as finding the way home!