Animal Minds (Animals)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 26, 2011, 18:01 (4898 days ago) @ dhw

Evolution itself was not NECESSARY for life in its original forms to go on, and so the real cornerstone of evolution has to be innovation. The explanations for this unsolved mystery can be divided into three scenarios:
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> 1) A UI created the mechanism of evolution and programmed its outcome. (Where did the UI come from? Why so many dead ends if it had planned everything from the start?)
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> 2) A UI created the mechanism of evolution and left it to do its own thing, perhaps occasionally intervening. (Where did the UI come from?)
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> 3) Sheer chance created the mechanism of evolution, which then did its own thing. (Requires quasi-religious faith in the creative genius of chance as opposed to religious faith in a UI.)
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> All three fit in with the process of evolution as we know it, and all three require faith in the unknowable and unprovable.-Excellent summary on your part in our discussion. At this point I think we have to analyze what we observe as the known history of life. Prop 1 doesn't fit. Evolution is innovative in all sorts of ways; the spiders that live underwater as one crazy example; fungus living on ants; humming birds that store an exact milligram of fat to make a 600-mile flight across the Gulf of Mexico from my backyard to Mexico to escape the winter. These are all survival techniques, undoubtedly set up through epigenetic mechanisms. So evolution was set up to go off in many directions, ending up in the massive bush we see. At the same time we do not yet know, research has not gone that far, whether there is a built-in directionality toward primates. Certainly evolution creates organisms that are complexer and complexer. So my guess at this point is Prop. 2 is the correct guess. Prop 3 is reasonably beyond all belief.-As for the other discussion, animal instinct, we've beaten it to death and will remain in disagreement. I work with horses, a dog, barn cats, and make bird houses and bird feeders. We have a deer preserve we live in. Civilized humans have sublimated most of the instictual behavior that underlies our evolution. But there are the uncivilized: bin Laden, Hitler, etc. and we go to war to defend ourselves.- The very civilized have developed mores way beyond the African and Muslim tribalism. In my opinion that colonization that disappeared after WWII disappeared because the Europeans who were the custodians raped the countries and did not develop the mores of the indigenous people properly. The European greed was a form of instinct I admit, and freeing the colonies was a form of selfishness. And the current EU with its poorly thought through social policies is now battling sovereign debt. But we can see all this clearly and we can learn from it.-On the other hand my new barn cat, after three weeks, remains afraid of me, doesn't yet recognize me as a friend. I'm feeding her, offering water and shelter, and she is still figuring it out, although we have had times when she will rub against me and I can pet her. If I did that for you, you would immediately recognize our friendly relationship.