Natures wonders: insect migration (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 11, 2021, 13:01 (865 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your 'ability to interpret' is the author's algorithm.
And:
The algorithm facilitates all the capacities you list. It takes a developmental week for the algorithm to be available.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I still have no concept of when God inserted necessary information during the course of evolution. Certainly, the start of life contained enormous amounts, but each new complexity added more.

If he didn’t preprogramme it all, he must have kept popping in whenever a new organ, lifestyle, natural wonder etc. was required, i.e. the first bee dance, the first ant bridge, the first weaverbird’s nest, the first flipper, the first absolutely everything, throughout 3.X billion years – and every one of them apparently necessary before he could pop in to design each new hominin and homo before at long last he could combine all the different bits and pieces to fulfil his one and only purpose: H. sapiens (plus food). Meanwhile, what do you think was the purpose of your God giving all these cell communities the ability to interpret if they didn’t need to interpret anything?

Ant bridge algorithm
DAVID: Not hiding. The concept that early stages of evolution are built upon by later stages as complexity increases is obvious.

Of course it is. But you insist that every stage of every life form was part of the goal of designing humans plus their food. THAT is what you keep hiding from, because you know it doesn’t make sense.

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.

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

DAVID: They are given the ability to interpret, just the opposite from your thought.

The ability to interpret is exactly my thought, since it entails the autonomous, intelligent use of all the abilities listed above, as opposed to bees and ants automatically obeying instructions.

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.

dhw: 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!

DAVID: Finding home needs some basic memory, nothing more. The bee has forward directions of direction, distance from the waggle. Memory of landmarks on the way brings them back. I'll grant basic memory supported by understanding initial information.

You have just told us that the bat’s mammalian brain has more interpretive ability because it can find its way home. The bee does far more than just find its way home! This suggests enhanced interpretive ability, i.e. enhanced intelligence.