Higher Intelligence

I think you are falsely conjoining two different things here: complexity and intelligence. Yes, the process on evolution may be complex, or seem complex to us, but it does not, in and of itself, own any intelligence. However, in the course of evolution, intelligence might be selected by nature if it confers a survival benefit.Then there is this matter of what, exactly, intelligence is. I wish someone had a way of taking human bias and arrogance out of our attempts to define intelligence. If you put Einstein and Sacajawea in a Manitoba woods to survive on their own, who's more intelligent? Yes, I know, it's all relative. But does technological achievement, including symbolic language, measure intelligence? Theoretical achievement? Or is it the ability to solve problems? An orb-weaving spider has to solve a lot of problems went it builds its web. Humans seem rather slow compared them in our history of engineered problem solving, depending upon how one chooses to define intelligence.”HM

The Kreb's cycle is complex, too, so how do you compare its "intelligence" with that of an evolutionary process? Iblis, you are not going to succeed here with a bunch of very alert and articulate scientists when you say things like this. I see a big, red going up the flagpole already.And when you say things like this: I know that there is no point in me sticking around here to give you a free science lesson.Tra la.”HM

I wish I understood enough about "instinct" to be able to explain how an orb-weaving spider "knows" how to build its web. I'm pretty sure its mother didn't teach it how to do that, and I know of no spider schools for that purpose. To say that it builds it out of instinct seems to be alluding the question. But I don't have a better idea to replace it. And I don't really know if "intelligence" is part of the explanation. The most plausible answer to this puzzle is that genes hold a kind of collective set of instructions that works as a cascading sequence of signals to solve web-building problems.Somewhere in a spider's makeup there has to be an ability to "decide" where and when to find a branch, add a strand, or make it sticky. Since baby spiders come from sperm and eggs, or sometimes only eggs, that trans-generational ability to build an orb web has to pass through a narrow aperture allowing little more than digitally coded instructions on DNA. Therefore, its "decisionmaking" abilities must reduce to digital arrays of cascading genetic switches, or something roughly in that ballpark.Of course we can always say that the Intelligent Designer, Mother Nature, or The Great Spider of The Woods is the source of such instinctive instructions. But I need a little more than that.”HM.

If spiders are such "robots" as you say, then they must be "programmed" for robotic tasks. And unless there really are mysterious templates, like Sheldrake's morphogenic fields, for spiders to build their webs upon, which I doubt, then said programming must be carried in the genes. We agree on that, and we also agree that evolution put it there.But we may disagree on which organism is more "intelligent" than another. Which species. If you ever happened to watch the ciliate Epidinium under the microscope, you have to ask some hard questions about intelligence and complexity. I couldn't tell you how intelligent they are, although they do remarkable things I can't do, but they are "complex" in a surprising way. These single-celled organisms have mouths, anuses, skeletons, antennae, ecotoplasms, cilia, and so forth. I don't have a single cell in my entire body, excluding extraneous organisms from ambient sources, that is as complex as an Epidinium's.I don't know how to measure "higher" intelligence. I don't think my intelligence if "higher" than Google's, for example, and Google doesn't even qualify as a living organism. Or does it?”HM

Big Brown’s jockey said after the Kentucky Derby: “He’s a very intelligent horse.” I’ve known dogs that forced humans to have conversations in spelled-out words to avoid being “understood” by them. I’ve known of squirrels that learned to water ski, flatworms that learned to avoid electric shocks, parrots that learned to speak meaningful English.Humans
Chimps
Squirrels
Parrots
Turtles
Sharks
Grasshoppers
Flatworms
Coelenterates
Protists
Archaea
BacteriaCS, please draw a line between two entries on my list that separates the “intelligent” creatures from the rest.”HM

So an organism needs to be a chordate to be "intelligent"? How come?”HM

This breaking news about monkeys that can control a robot with their thoughts seems relevant here, because now we have monkeys that can do that, but no human I know has that MENTAL capability. Could those monkeys, as such, be regarded as more "intelligent" than humans?”HM

Thanks, Perdition. I hadn't read it carefully enough. Now I'm thinking that since such mental gymnastics are not limited specifically to either monkeys or humans the argument for human-only intelligence seems defeated, at least in part.”HM

Here's an idea for you to consider. I suspect you have a bad case of "designer fixation," which is contagious amongst true believers, especially Christians. This is evident in your assertion that Darwinian evolution has "intelligence." That notion is as biologically incorrect as the idea of sponge wearing square pants and calling himself Bob.But you don't need to be beaten up over this mistake. I blame Darwin for your misconception. If he had chosen another word besides "selection" to explain how populations evolve, you might be less confused. "Selection," to many people, implies intent, purpose, planning, and design. I would prefer instead the word "elimination" to describe how a population rids itself of its weaker members.Maybe you should revise your thinking to allow for an "Intelligent Eliminator." Or maybe not.”HM

And I think intelligence appears in nature by degrees. I admit to seeing intelligence in a termite colony, a race horse, and in body politic.Can consciousness be dissociated from intelligence? Can a person have "higher consciousness" and still be less "intelligent." Can the Dalai Lama solve Fermat's last thoerem?I believe I have intelligence and/or consciousness that can be viewed on a broad scale that includes even plants and fungi. Is intelligence or consciousness anything more than an extended phenotype that confers survival benefits? Some animals grew antennae to gather information and survive. Some grew long noses. And some grew fancier feathers. We grew fancier brains.I also take notice that plants grow fancier and more beautiful reproductive organs than humans do. By comparison, I'd say flowers are more beautiful than our sexual counterparts. But that's a subjective argument.”HM

You don't? What about this from Message 1? And then you bring up a non-scientist with a Christian bent like C. S. Lewis: The red ones just keep going up the flagpole. Do you really understand the "random thing"? Could you explain how selection is "random"? I can see how mutations are random, but not selection. Selection does not take a few fit ones here and a few unfit ones there. Selection takes the ones that nature can get to most easily. In this regard selection can be viewed as deterministic.Now, I'll be waiting for you to assert that if selection is deterministic then it must be "intelligent." Then I suppose Earth "is intelligence," too, since it hosts humans. Why are you even bothering to clean up those raggedy shreds from the Gaia hippies? Who cares what they think? From Wikipedia:

quote:

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In 1955, Thompson and James V. McConnell conditioned planarian flatworms by pairing a bright light with an electric shock. After repeating this several times they took away the electric shock, and only exposed them to the bright light. The flatworms would react to the bright light as if they had been shocked. Thompson and McConnell found that if they cut the worm in two, and allowed both worms to regenerate each half would develop the light-shock reaction. In 1962, McConnell repeated the experiment, but instead of cutting the trained flatworms in two he ground them into small pieces and fed them to other flatworms. Incredibly these flatworms learned to associate the bright light with a shock much faster than flatworms who had not been fed trained worms.
This experiment intended to show that memory could perhaps be transferred chemically. The experiment was repeated with mice, fish, and rats, but it always failed to produce the same results, . The perceived explanation was that rather than memory being transferred to the other animals, it was the hormones in the ingested ground animals that changed its behaviour.[6] McConnell believed that this was evidence of a chemical basis for memory, which he identified as memory RNA. McConnell's results are now attributed to observer bias.[7] No double-blind experiment has ever reproduced his results.

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This also brings into question whether or not memory is a good measure of "intelligence."”HM