Smart animals (Animals)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 20, 2016, 19:28 (2767 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:You have said you regard human specialness as proof of God's planning or intervention, but since you believe every innovation and natural wonder is proof of God's planning or intervention, why keep harping on about humans?-Because you keep denigrating the leap to humans, which is part of my conclusive evidence for me.
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> David's comment (under “tap dancing”): Stamp your foot to get attention? I don't understand what just-so story would explain why this instinct develops in evolution. Nothing demands this appear.
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> dhw: What “just-so” story are you thinking of? That God taught them how to tap dance? If we regard evolution as a process in which different organisms do things in their own particular way, and if we stop imagining that God has planned everything or that only humans know what they're doing, the whole higgledy-piggledy history of life on earth begins to make sense.-No, I'm referencing Darwinists invention of just-so stories to explain something which has no explanation.God gave them tap-dancing? Who knows? Perhaps a learned instinct. It is not a complex weaver nest issue.
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> DAVID (under “tree communication”): This article describes how trees react to danger and communicate, and much more:
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> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3792036/Do-trees-brains.html
> QUOTES: "There's increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn.”
> "It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it's hard to be sceptical.-> David's comment: I view these reactions as automatic and amazing. They require some biochemical planning, not as complex as speciation. I'm not sure if God helped or they learned to do it on their own.
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> dhw: Trees are cell communities, just like every other organism, but you view all manifestations of intelligence as being automatic unless they are performed by a cell community with a brain (although paradoxically you believe that consciousness can exist independently of the brain, as in NDEs). On the other hand, your last sentence seems to open the door to autonomous intelligence: how do you learn to do something on your own if you don't know what you're doing? Perhaps you will once again trot out something about God guiding them, which of course is the opposite of “on their own”.-I honestly don't know but my inclination is that it is coded in their genome with God's help.
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> dhw: dhw (under “Video”): But now you try to fudge the issue again by replacing guidance with “guidelines”. (Presumably something like: Thou shalt not do what thou canst not do.) Once more, “working things out for themselves” entails autonomous cellular intelligence. Either you agree that this is possible or you don't. -I'm not fudging. I've always consistently thought of inventive mechanisms as having guidance or guidelines, which are one and the same to me.
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> BBELLA: Might not the guidelines be Sheldrake's morphogenic field? 
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> dhw: I thought we had all agreed that Sheldrake's morphogenic field preserves forms but does not explain innovation - it comprises what already exists, and is then added to by whatever is new. (That is why I objected to the term “morphogenetic”.) 
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> DAVID: I've never changed my stance. An onboard inventive mechanism is possible, but it will always contain guidelines or guidance. No need to go round and round. 
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> dhw: If you want us to stop going round and round, then please state once and for all whether you believe it is or is not possible that your God endowed organisms with autonomous intelligence enabling them to work out their own innovations without any divine preprogramming or divine dabbling, though staying within the bounds of what environmental conditions and their own capabilities allow.-Only with guidance or guidelines. I have never insinuated anything different.