New Miscellany 2: eco, intelligent cuttlefish, human feet (General)

by dhw, Sunday, June 01, 2025, 12:22 (3 days ago) @ dhw

Ecosystems

DAVID: What is essential for humans is the complex organization of all the ecosystems on Earth providing us with a food support for 8+ billion humans rising to ten billion estimated. The opossum has his niche.

DAVID: You are so blind to the importance of ecosystems, it must be purposeful as a way to criticize what God has evolved.

Ecosystems are and always have been essential for every form of life that has ever existed during the last 3.8 billion years. There is no criticism of God (if he exists and created them) but only of your theory that every single one was created for the sake of humans plus food, and that even a simple survival strategy (the opossum) must have been preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, or the subject of a divine dabble essential for the wellbeing of us humans.

Intelligent cuttlefish

DAVID: if a Cuttlefish is naturally programmed to lie in wait as it forages it has a built-in understanding of delayed gratification. It appears the study simply looked at an instinct.

dhw: You went on and on about “testing” the resin-using insect before you would accept that it is intelligent. Now you completely ignore the tests made on the cuttlefish (as quoted above) and focus only on a form of behaviour which would have developed naturally out of experience. The tests prove the cuttlefish’s intelligence (which unlike instinctive actions varies from individual to individual) but no, prejudice wins again.

DAVID: Not my prejudice. From the article:

QUOTES: Cuttlefish, as far as we know, don't use tools or cache food, nor are they especially social. The researchers think this ability to delay gratification may instead have something to do with the way cuttlefish forage for their food.

We speculate that delayed gratification may have evolved as a byproduct of this, so the cuttlefish can optimize foraging by waiting to choose better quality food." (dhw’s bold)

It's a fascinating example of how very different lifestyles in very different species can result in similar behaviors and cognitive abilities."(dhw’s bold)

DAVID: The study shows my point!!

I’ve removed some quotes for the sake of brevity, as these are enough to illustrate your point. Cognitive abilities are integral to intelligence. You have given this article the heading “Intelligent cuttlefish”, and have totally ignored the first half, so here some more quotes bearing in mind that the researchers were testing for intelligence:

“They pass a child's test…”

"Their ability to learn, anticipate future rewards, and adapt their behaviour…”

"The other part of the experiment was to test how good the six cuttlefish were at learning.

"Interestingly, the cuttlefish that learnt to adapt to this change the quickest were also the cuttlefish that were able to wait longer for the shrimp reward.”

The authors speculate that there is a connection with foraging – an instinct no doubt developed from experience – but these tests demand instant decisions. Learning on the spot to solve a totally new problem requires intelligence, and crucially it is clear that individuals differ in their ability to solve such problems. In other words, some cuttlefish are more intelligent than others.

You have already accepted that parrots, corvids, some insects and animals are intelligent, but you still deny the possibility that others may be intelligent too. Your God has to make all their decisions for them.

Our special feet

DAVID: another aspect of our exceptionality. Mobility.

dhw: I really don’t think we are any more mobile than our four-footed friends, and I would suggest that it was not the shape of our feet that enabled us to tackle long-distance locomotion, but our desire to go further and further afield that gradually produced the changes described above. [I shan't repeat the whole argument here.]

DAVID: God gave us migrating feet. Another example of your anti-exceptionalism prejudice.

There is no “anti-exceptionalism”. I am not denying that our feet are different from other animals’ feet! I am offering an explanation of HOW those feet may have evolved BECAUSE we migrated and not in order to allow us to migrate. Instead of considering my proposal, you simply repeat your own theory, that your God operated on our ancestors' legs, pelvises and now feet, and then told them to go walkies. NB: The ability of cells to make changes to their structure in response to new conditions does not exclude your God, who may have given them this ability in the first place.