What you see with your own eyes vs what scientists claim

Yes. Enforced change in diet at some point in their history, inducing such a change in behaviour is perfectly possible.Your incredulity is telling. Not so long ago your question could have been...Do you honestly think that the Earth is round and the oceans don't spill out?I don't buy incredulity.

I admitted it was possible, it just doesn't seem plausible.How can this induction of a change in behavior be in all the crows if it comes from the diet? All the crow would have to be eating the same foreign substance and it would have to affect them all in the same way.This possibility does not explain the phenomenon better than the one that postulates that the behavior is learned or evolved.So I guess I was correct when I said in Message 125:

quote:

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Or do you like it only because it is not-learned and not-evolved? You know, because you're biased against those being the only options...

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i) Change of diet caused by catastrophic eradication of a food source.
ii) Contamination of food source through epidemic of fungus/bacteria/virus etc.
iii) Change of diet cause by eradication of habitat at some point in history.
iv) Introduction of totally new food source into the diet.etc.Having the same effect once ingested is very plausible.

I can't get over realizing that you are just grabbing at anything you can think because you want there to be a non-learned, non-evolved mechanism.I have no interest of discussion of that nature.It is preposterous to suggest that there is something in the nuts that allows the crows to find the optimum height. And that this is a non-learned, non-evolved behavior.The crows are on drugs, that's how they find the optimum height. Basically, I'm not going to argue with you that the sky is not green.

If the change happened in the past, how was it transmitted to present day populations if not by evolution?Also. You have insisted that behavioral changes are not due to evolution or learning for ALL species. Not just crows.Are you suggesting that all behavioral changes for all species are, at root, dietary?

No need to argue. You are entitled to your opinion.We can just debate our opinions, get to a point of irreducible difference and leave it there, in a dignified fashion. No need to sign off with a rant, at all.

I don't think you're being honest in your arguments.You just want to oppose evolution...You're a troll and I'm an asshole so you can expect more rants from me.

Indeed, or we can theoretically do it by surgery or science fiction like with cybernetics or matrix-like downloads. Yes, I would say it was essentially impossible to form purely rational chess strategies once you have experienced chess. Any strategy will be even tainted by the fact that you know it takes place on a 64 square board. Of course, you could forget everything about chess and go back to attempting to discover a good chess strategy without any remembered experience of it. Yes. I see it. They show what happens in the fixed loss scenario and what happens in a increasing risk of loss with height scenario. The scenario that they don't cover is a decreasing risk of loss with height. That was the scenario I was referring to: "Are you thinking that loss probability might possibly go down as height increases?", and as I rightly observed: That is not in the model. Let me go back the original argument: In the simple model I presented to you earlier, a similar thing happened. I designed it so that if you were at 1m you would need to increase your height to maximise your energy. Different reasons, but the idea that the height can be increased to maximise energy is not news to me.Now, the graph shows that the optimum drop height can rise with increases to kleptoparasitism probability if the risk of loss does not increase with height.So I thought that maybe you disagree with them picking a risk that linearly increases with height, that might be an interesting avenue of thought and that's why I suggested you provide your modified equation for P_L(h).Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

I think that is a good place simply to agree to disagree?In my experience it is possible and I go with the "evidence of my own eyes". It is in the model. P can be any function of h. They happen to have picked and examined 3 cases, but the model covers all cases.If P varies with h but is approximately constant, for example, then the optimum drop height/maximum loss probability curve will lie close to the upper curve shown in figure 5. For such a function the optimum drop height would initially increase with increased maximum loss probability.

I'm having difficulty finding a connection between your premise and your line of argument. I keep going back to your OP. The documentary you mention can't be used as evidence because no one else can see it. Even if I fully accept your description of it, it just sounds like a typical documentary. I couldn't possibly count the number of documentaries I've turned off after less than 10 minutes because of what were either errors or gross simplifications so severe that they seemed like errors. There aren't that many good documentaries on television.After reading just the first three paragraphs of your OP, I had the impression that you'd be arguing differently then you actually are, that you would be introducing examples like this:

• If you see a ghost and scientists say there's no such thing as ghosts, are you going to believe scientists or your own eyes?
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• If you see a UFO and scientists say it was swamp gas, then are you going to believe scientists or your own eyes?
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• If you're thinking of a friend you haven't heard from in a long time, and the friend calls you a minute later, are you going to believe scientists' claims of coincidence or your own experience?
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• If you see rock layers in the Grand Canyon that look like a flood deposited them, are you going to believe scientists that they were deposited over millions of years or your own eyes?
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• If you see new species appear suddenly in the fossil record, then are you going to believe the scientific explanation of the rarity of fossilization or what you see happening in the layers?

Those are the kinds of examples I expected you'd offer.I don't think we'll convince you that the problems you think you're finding in those papers are either trivial or don't exist, but it doesn't seem like a significant enough issue to even try, plus your arguments are unpersuasive on their face and don't really need active rebuttal.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Right. I got that part. What I was trying to point out with my reply was that ingestion of a substance with abnormal consequences - such as fermented fruit - doesn't constitute any kind of behavioral change if the ingestion was "accidental" during the course of normal behavior. It's neither learned nor evolved - it's accidental. And doesn't, in fact, constitute a behavior change per se. In short, there is nothing there to challenge the conclusions in the paper as I read it.

Percy,I think each of the topics Sin has introduced (including this one) is an excuse to get to this: There is no evolved or learned behavior.Much like tesla (only his hobbyhorse is "existence").When pressed to offer an alternative, he came up with "chemicals".How he could possibly think "chemicals" are the source of all evolution is beyond me. But there you have it.Edited by molbiogirl, : No reason given.

I'm not at all sure that is correct. After all, he does have a topic on spider intelligence, and it seems to me that he is arguing there for the ability of the spider to learn.

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Let's end the political smears

Nope. Not once has the man used the word "learn". (Just did a search.)However, to be certain, I will ask him directly:Sin, is spider behavior (1) evolved (2) learned (3) other?

I am not quite sure if this belongs in this thread or in the spider intelligence thread, but I suppose one could always move it as appropriate.In regard to mammals such as elephants and baboons, among a few others IIRC, they have a propensity toward excess consumption of alcohol according to the documentary Animals are Beautiful People by Jaime Uys: Beautiful People (1974) - IMDb You may remember him as the later writer/director of the Gods Must be Crazy films.In the middle of the documentary, the creatures of the Kalahari annually congregate at a given area for a few weeks to imbibe of the fermented fruit and party down in the great tradition of college undergraduates. Results of such intoxication are quite similar to their human counterparts as we witness our primate kindred falling out of trees dead drunk while the elephants stumble along and trumpet something marginally resembling Irish pub songs.It is an interesting example of animal plotting and planning indicating intelligence and convergent behavior among divergent species.And I'll drink to that

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Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider - Francis BaconThe more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza