Natures wonders: insect migration (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 17, 2021, 14:18 (860 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Learning wolf language is no different than human language, given the child has a given innate primary facility residing in his developing brain.

dhw: You’ve got it at last! All life forms have their own language, and all life forms are born with the ABILITY to learn the language of the species they grow up with, which for some reason you are now calling an “innate primary facility”. There is no difference between their ability and ours, other than in the context of time and scale. That ability (perhaps God-given) requires the characteristics of intelligence that I have listed. See also the article you have posted under “cellular intelligence”.

DAVID: I'll agree with God given.

dhw: Good. I hope this means you now accept the concept of God-given intelligence in such life forms as bees and ants, though of course at a far lower level than our own.

DAVID: I haven't accepted your version.

It was you who picked on the example of language learning. A human child learns language by perceiving, processing information, communicating, decision making etc. So do animals and insects. They all have the ability (= “innate primary facility”) to do this, and that ability may have been given to them by your God. So once more: please explain the difference, apart from the time it takes and the scale of the language that is learned.

Fly brain vector math
DAVID: as the article notes, our brain does the same thing. How did this ability develop? Not by chance. It is so important to all activity by all organisms, it fits the need for design.

I agree, and here too you have drawn a parallel between human and insect abilities. One might even be inclined to think that if God exists, he gave insects and animals and humans similar autonomous abilities, which of course in our case have developed far beyond the limited scale of the life forms that preceded us.