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

by David Turell , Sunday, June 01, 2025, 00:31 (1 day, 14 hours, 57 min. ago) @ dhw

Under “Clever corvids” now “cellular intelligence”

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.

dhw: For 3.X thousand million years, none of the complex ecosystems provided us with anything, because we weren’t even around then. Even today, we do not munch every species in every ecosystem. And do you really believe that your God gave the opossum a lecture on how to feign death because it was necessary for the survival of the 8+ billion humans?

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

Cells controlling the gut

DAVID: Intelligently designing evolution is not 'messing things up', but gradually replacing older forms with new better designs. 99.9% loss is not surprising.

dhw: But 99.9% of the older forms were not replaced with new better designs. They came to a dead end. As you keep agreeing and then forgetting, we and our food are descended from the 0.1% of survivors, not the 99.9% that did not survive. We’re not talking about surprises. We know the approximate extinction rate. And the question is how we explain it. Your explanation is that your omnipotent, omniscient God kept messing up his own plan to create us plus food. That is why you keep telling us he is inefficient!

I agree it is a poor method of creation, but successive species are improvements over preceding forms despite your confused view of evolution. Evolution results in newer, better forms doesn't it? Yes or no.

Intelligent cuttlefish

QUOTES: "Once they had learnt to associate a square with a reward, the researchers switched the cues, so that the other square now became the reward cue.”
"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.”

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.

Not my prejudice. From the article:

"In species such as parrots, primates, and corvids, delayed gratification has been linked to factors such as tool use (because it requires planning ahead), food caching (for obvious reasons) and social competence (because prosocial behavior – such as making sure everyone has food – benefits social species).

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.

"Cuttlefish spend most of their time camouflaging, sitting and waiting, punctuated by brief periods of foraging," Schnell said at the time.

"They break camouflage when they forage, so they are exposed to every predator in the ocean that wants to eat them. 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."

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

The study shows my point!!

Our special feet

QUOTE: Our cushioned heels strike the ground, and an arched sole transfers weight toward the front of our feet, propelling us forward. Our robust big toes push off into the next step, the final note in an efficient stride for long-distance locomotion.

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. With a few exceptions (e.g. migrating birds), animals are happy to stay where they are so long as there’s enough food. Humans are curious about what lies over the hill. The pressures of bipedalism would naturally have changed the structures. It’s the same process as pre-whales’ legs turning into flippers.. Your God operates and says “Go live in the water”, whereas I propose that they go live in the water, and their legs turn into flippers. But your God may have given their cells the autonomous ability to make the changes.

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