What you see with your own eyes vs what scientists claim

You need to look back here Message 51
Then citation here Message 55They were wrong, QED. My eyes don't tell me the world is flat.

Sure, once we get those citations, I will explain how they conflict with my observations.

I'm not interested in damage control. The scientists were wrong.Looking out now I see streets and houses. If I go out and walk a short distance I can see hills.Alternatively you can try and tell me what I see, but you'll have to go and argue about that with yourself. You can even create a new thread somewhere all for yourself, creating your very own make belief scenarios and arguing against them with yourself.

Here we go again. Let me correct you. Should read you'll simply find journals regarding learned behavior and instinctual behavior. You'll note an absence of other behavior, however, because scientists have no real evidence it exists, and scientists have no way to study it.So why did the paper base a conclusion on an inconclusive statement when the word "know" would have been fine?

It was a response to a specific request asking where scientists were ever all wrong. Go back and read it properly. If you think the question was irrelevant, take it up with the person who asked it.Your point about 'chi' etc. is irrelevant to that point. That's the problem. I am talking about what I see, and you are talking about "reasonable conclusions". They are your "reasonable conclusions", not mine. Do we need more yellow highlighting here. Scientists do like to omit the possessive. Not at all. It's an invitation. Please go ahead.

I am sorry, for a citation, I am going to need something far more specific that 'Lorenz' or 'Darwin'. You might as well have said nothing for all that is worth.

Of course. You are making points based on things for which you can't provide a citation. So I repeated the request for a citation.Clearly, your tactic was to give me a reference that was so vague that you yourself find it ridiculous... (Typo trapse corrected and colour added)You've also combined it with your bizarre excuse that you won't bother with a citation because I wouldn't be satisfied with it. I don't recall you ever accepting that as a valid excuse from anyone.And you think you sound reasonable? Failure to produce citation by Modulous. I'll leave it at that and address other points in a separate post.

First point.Learned behaviour is a response to experience. If behaviour spontaneously changes it cannot be learned behaviour.For example, if your capability and behaviour changed as a result of ingesting a drug, would you say that was learned behaviour? I would say it was NOT learned behaviour.Second point.The paper focuses on an energy expense model

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Complex and energetically expensive foraging tasks should be shaped by natural selection to be efficient.

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One of the factors tested against was kleptoparasitism

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To determine whether crows adjusted drop height with respect to potential kleptoparasitism, we tested for a correlation between drop height and an index of "kleptoparasite intensity," using the data from all first drops of English walnuts at the Birch Lane site.

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In the characterization of prey loss section it says...

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An essential characteristic of any avian prey-dropping system is the likelihood of losing prey before it can be retrieved, such as through kleptoparasitism. Prey loss, if it occurs, might be constant with regard to drop height, or it might increase when a bird drops prey from greater heights.

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They fail to consider prey loss decreasing when a bird drops prey from a greater height. Why?

It sounds as if you agree that the new aspects of the behaviour are not learned. i.e what you could do after that you couldn't do before, is not learned. Agreed? That was for one drop. The likelihood of the prey breaking also increases, so fewer drops would be needed. How do they know that wouldn't outweigh the benefit of shorter retrieval?Edited by sinequanon, : Changed 'longer retrieval' to 'shorter retrieval'

Absolutely not. Performance enhancing drugs are very common in sport and games. It's one thing for which officials do look out.So this evolved/learned description that you called a dichotomy has now changed to something you think is only highly probable? No. Read the conclusion. Their model predicts energy maximisation.

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Our model predicted that if birds maximize the energy obtained from each dropped food item, they should take into account the intensity of kleptoparasitism, the likelihood of each item breaking given its hardness and previous weakening, and the hardness of the substrate. American crows adjusted the height from which they dropped walnuts as our model predicted, if they were accounting for each of these factors.

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This suggests that these crows have evolved or learned to maximize the energy obtained from each dropped walnut.

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For kleptoparasitism they tested one drop, which does not test energy maximisation, and then said the results agreed with their model.

No. My point is that I do not see how the question they answered ties in with their conclusion that crows are maximising energy.

No idea. I do not think their purpose is to work on the brain or the nervous system. Drugs which do, alter behaviour. Semantics. We are agreed it can take many drops to break a nut and thereby obtain the energetic value. Their test took into account only one of them, i.e the first drop. The number of drops required to break the nut was missing from their test as an independent variable. But it is a critical variable in measuring energy expended. Without it, their conclusion that the crows maximised energy with regard to kleptoparasitism is flawed. I can't find this "quote" anywhere in the paper by the way.

Are these actual values? If so, which graph did you use and how did you work them out?Are you satisfied with your working?

You misread. I have to say, your logic seems a little haywire, too.I said performance enhancing drugs in sports and games. The muscle mass stuff was your own little tangent. Drugs can be used to improve your reactions, memory, clarity of thought, creativity, perception etc. I understand it as energy gained vs energy expended.Against what variable did you think they were considering energy gain?

I am more familiar with chess. In chess you create strategy on the fly. You are not just applying existing strategy. Your ability to create a strategy depends on your level of comprehension of the whole situation. Your strategy is a set of decisions dependent on and specific to the current position. As games differ, so you need new strategies, not just learned ones. Flight cost is one measure of energy expended, which is what I imagined. In this experiment it can only be reckoned using both height of drop and number of drops. Omitting the number of drops (or probability of prey breaking) from the reckoning means you lose track of flight cost.