Life and Thought

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by questor

do you know a lot about beavers? my knowledge of beavers comes from first hand experience with them on the rivers and streams of the Rocky Mountains, where they are considered pests and eliminated on a regular basis. the reason for this is they deforest areas which the property owner has spent time and money planting, and they divert rivers and streams from their proper beds, which cause flooding and stagnant pools where mosquitos breed. of course, if we got rid of the people, the beavers could do whatever they wish.

Heh, heh. Man vs. Beaver. Guess who's gonna win that one! I'm not saying they're cute little furry things and we shouldn't harm a single little hair on their heads. I'm saying that they could be extremely successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Sure they're a burr in your backside: you're both fighting for dominance of a habitat. I think the beavers will lose, but who are you to say they don't have a right to create mosquito infested swamps? They're probably really pissed about your stealing "their" fish, or building those "stinky" swimming pools....

"It all depends on your point of view."
Buffy

[questor]

Buffy, don't go ''wobbly'' on me. the beavers and man can only co-exist where the beavers do not destroy man's environment. if your idea of a perfect world is one where man and his weapons, and his garbage, and his sewage, and his effluence does not exist, then that also eliminates you, does it not?

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by questor

Buffy, don't go ''wobbly'' on me. the beavers and man can only co-exist where the beavers do not destroy man's environment. if your idea of a perfect world is one where man and his weapons, and his garbage, and his sewage, and his effluence does not exist, then that also eliminates you, does it not?

You completely mis-read my post. I don't really care that much if you go shoot them all. Its survival of the fittest, and if the beavers can't deal with your shotgun, that's how evolution works! If they can't co-exist with man, and they can't figure out a way to evolve to survive shotgun blasts, then Darwin says they're going to go the way of the Dodo. The question was though, if man weren't here, what would develop, and I argue that beavers are dang smart, and have incredible construction skills and could do it. The rights and wrongs about eliminating biodiversity are beyond the scope of the thread as its been defined so I'm taking *no* position on it here! Honest!

Idly checks the magazine and slips in the clip on her 1911 Colt .45 Semi,
Buffy

[damocles]

Damocles, good thought. let's say you did remove the human animal from the earth, what is left ? what would the earth look like now and 10,000 years from now? would it be jungle, desert, wasteland, wonderland? the human has the mental capacity to be a husband to the land if he so chooses. currently no other animal has this capacity. would they develop it? nothing so far indicates they would. perhaps they would just exist on the
land that the non-creator gave them. without sentient thought, without technology and with the wildness they were born with.

By Questor

No humans would probably mean that we would have one serious species killoff(the present one) deferred until a natural event equal in magnitude of effect to hominid range encroachment radically altered the planetary eco-system.

I don't anticipate any fundamental environmental change(Yes I know about hominide induced global warming/heat pollution, but that is a minor climate blip compared to the cycle of ice ages the earth undergoes regularly.)

I seriously wonder if there would be present tool using sapience. I believe that Buffy is correct that there were/are several dozen competing species intelligences and approaches on Earth at present undergoing selection and editting by what schmucks like me call 'natural selection" but which in reality is more properly "common decent" of the most efficiently reproductive organisms. What that non-human intelligence looks like is subject to speculation that I cannot validate(I don't know enough to argue a fact based extrapolation of say tool using raccoon society, sorry.). I know that developing the non-hominid tool user would take at least as long if not much longer than the more idealy morphed hominid. After we, had three million years or more of stereoscopic vision, opposable thumb and bipedalism to pressure us toward tool use, yet for how long did homo erecti wander about? 800,000 years? Then suddenly a pair of new improved versions of hominid shows up 200,000 years ago? That seems like catastrophic survival imperative to me that favored a new hominid popping up in an isolated ecology.

That is why I suspect she underestimates the difficulty of inheriting the right morphology or showing up in the right niche ecology to produce something that looks and acts like us if you didn't have several hominid lines running around loose with which to begin.. I suspect that if Neanderthal became a tool user like Cro Magnon in his ecological island(Europe) we would not recognize the eventual present product at all! He, Neanderthal, might have a totally different wetware and application of reasoned adaptive behaviors than we do.

On another speculative note:

Buffy likes Castor canadensisis which is a very good rodent candidate to replace us.

I tend to like the raccoon myself, because, I think he is a closer fit to us in size function and intelligence to us as a prototype as we started to differentiate into our several primate hominid lines some seven to five million years ago.

In summary, the presence of evolving intelligence was/is a generalized current mammal trait. The various responses to environmental drivers(sonars in cetaceans, opposable thumb/bipedalism in hominids, smell in rodents, raccoons and bears) drives the expanding brain coomplexities in the various competing mammal intelligences. If stone tool chipping didn't cut it on land, maybe our sonar using dolphin cousins in the oceans would find a biological tool morphing way. The potential is currently there in multiple animal origin points. We, if we are careful and lucky may see it occur in our species lifetime before we go extinct. Inevitably our machines will see it, for those I know will be sapient soon and those will survive beyond the sapient biologicals here on the Earth.

[questor]

Bully for you Nemo, interesting post. i must agree with most of your thoughts. we seem to have strayed afield of my thread which was to get other's thoughts on the biochemical basis of life and thought. if you consider life, what is it? it's more than a simple chemical reaction. how does a human being sit and form a thought ? like he might say, i'll go to the grocery store for a six-pack. what biochemical process does this entail?

[Fishteacher73]

Originally Posted by questor

Buffy, since you seem to believe that animals exhibit sentient behavior, could you give me about 3 or 4 examples of animal behavior which exhibits true thought, like seeing a problem, considering the problem and solving the problem. please do not use examples which are preprogrammed into the animals instincts, like searching for food, migrating, raising offspring and the like. i'm not talking about reacting to a stimulus, i'm talking about true abstract thought.

I already gave you two examples of animals using unique thinking paterns and learning. So, to recap and add a few:

1. Koko--use of sign language and genration of new symbols for abstract ideas such as emotions.
2. African Grey parots-- Exceptional ability to manimpulate and create sounds. The ability to compose unique sentences for specific results.
3. Octopi- Learning through observation. Standard pavolvian tests were run on one and the others observed and learned the correct behavor.
4. Group hunting animals must teach their young the propper ways to hunt and adapt to the various prey.


Again, as Buffy stated, intelligence is not the inevitable outcome in evolutiuon. Evolution just provides the adpatation for a species to be better fit for their environments. Species that are still around due to their ability to survive, such as sharks, cocodilians, and bacteria. Existence is the only purpose of life.

As for human thought, it is simply the result of previous experience. Essentially a long series of electro-cemical if-then statements. There is no special essence of life, it is just the culmative result of all our chemical reactions. There is not a missing or elusive part.

[questor]

we have a difference of opinion. i don't think a couple of examples of animals conducting simple tasks which at best show a minimal capacity of thought in any way compares to an animal that has progressed light years ahead of these tasks in a fraction of the time.
whenever i consider an issue i don't understand, i always ask myself what causes this activity at its lowest level. what is the activity on the most basic particulate level which yields these results. i don't think that life and thought can be explained simply as chemical reactions, unless one can name the chemicals and describe the reactions.

[Fishteacher73]

Sorry I don't have a PhD in Neurochemistry,but the basic nerve function is that of a electochemical responce. Either through Ca and K ion transfer(electrical) or through a myriad of other neurotransmitters such as dopamine, endorphins, etc. The brain is no different than any other organ. It is the culmination of its cells and tissues. These act as a whole to perform a function, at no point does the organ gain special; abilities that the cells and tissues do not have as a whole. The liver does not have some special ability to do liver things that the cells do not provide.

Early Homo sapiens actually gained technology from the Neandertals. Early fossils indicate that we gained some tool designs from them.

[Fishteacher73]

Pick any task you like, there is an animal that does it better.
Building?- Termites and corals...dwarf anything man has EVER made.
Navigation?- Sea turtles and migratory birds..
Comunication?- blue whales converse over hundreds of miles.
Energy harnessing?-- plants
Man is only mediocre in may areas. We have only been here a split second geologically and will be gone shortly. We may be smart, but not that smart.

[damocles]

Sure why not? Neanderthal looks more and more sophisticated the more we learn about them. They were physically much more robust, and their brain cases were about the same size as H.Sapiens. They had *very* sophisticated social structures, tools and so forth, but H.Sapiens were not only smarter but seemed to have some technological advances. I think its virtually certain that they would have evolved down the same path, but may have taken a little longer to get there.

By Buffy

I can speculate a little about this. Autopsies of contemporary Cro Magnon and Neanderthal fossils show an odd set of facts.

Mister Neanderthal had far more animal inflicted injuries that he survived than Mister Cro Magnon(tooth marks on bone and broken bones). It also appeared to be a more common cause of death for him. Mister Cro Magnon tended to more often die from disease, accident, and old age.

This seems to indicate that Mister Neanderthal was a close quarters killer/scavenger and/or was surprised and killed as prey more often than his Cro Magnon neighbor.

So I agree that technology and behavior both gave the Cro Magnon a distict advantage over Neanderthal. I might even argue that this fossil evidence provides the clearest earliest indication that social evolution is kicking in as a method of common decent.

Hominids that learn how to ambush hunt from a distance(throwing spears, and luring animals into dead fall traps) and scavenge food better(Post a keen eyed hominid on a hill to yell a warning when the lion shows up whenthe group gathers berries or when driving off hyenas from a dead buffalo), without having some leopard or the lion eat the food gathers will have more kids and feed them better than a hominid trying to shove a spear into a ground sloth. That Cro Magnon; I might also speculate might have learned how to lager in larger groups so that he could task specialize better than our Neanderthal. Distribution of hominid fossil remains might suggest such larger social groups.

Has anybody researched the astonishing Homo Sapien tendency to produce a singular individual at fairly rapid intervals who produces a worldview shifting idea of how to do things, and tried to map this statistically into the paleological record? Has anybody tried to do the tool archaeology to map the distribution of innovation by other hominid species so that the different hominid species can be compared to each other statistically for such evidence of innovation?

I doubt that there is sufficient archaelogical tool evidence to yield meaningful results for the speed of idea dessimination among the various hominids over time, but there should be enough examples and data points of tool remains; to generate a srtatistical basis for the number of innovations per hominid species during the time aforesaid species walked the Earth. Comparison of that would be very interesting.