Purely to burst your bubble:
Dolphins can’t breathe underwater either. They have to come to the surface and breathe air, same as you.
::ducks and runs back to GQ::
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Ah but here is the kicker. Someone can come and train me how to build a better house than a beaver. Go try and teach a beaver how to make even a rudimentary structure that’s not a dam. Human’s have very little in the way of instict. That’s why we have such long periods as children, it all has to be taught to us. But, on the plus side it can be taught to us. We can learn. Animals can not. We can teach them to modify instictual behavior to meet our own ends. But, they can’t learn anything beyond the knowledge that is instilled in them. Humans can. That’s what makes us such fabuous creatres. Those cognitive skills. The abillity to reason a way out of something. Also, I never said beavers don’t react to the environment. I stated they don’t react in the same way that people do. They can’t change their environment, then react to that changed environment to change it further, then react to that environment to enact furher changes.
A good example?
Agriculture. Of course people couldn’t build cities without it. Once it was developed, we could build cities, once we were city dwellers other invention came about.
A beaver can not react to a changed environment. They must evolove into a new species or die.
the significant difference i see between people and other animals is our very sophisticated communication and the resulting body of knowledge we have built up over tens of thousands of years. if any of us were placed in the wild, how many of us would be able to produce steel hunting weapons much less motorized vehicles or cell phones?? i think most of us would live at a very animalistis level for the remainder of our life.
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quote oldscratch:
Ah but here is the kicker. Someone can come and train me how to build a better house than a beaver.
a better house for you, or for a beaver?? i doubt you or i could ever build a better house for a beaver than one they can build for themselves.
oldscratch:
Go try and teach a beaver how to make even a rudimentary structure that’s not a dam.
you can try, but i don’t think the beaver will give a damn.
oldscratch:
We can learn. Animals can not. We can teach them to modify instictual behavior to meet our own ends. But, they can’t learn anything beyond the knowledge that is instilled in them. Humans can.
animals can’t learn?? you’re not serious?? koko learned human sign language. my cousin’s dog gets him beer from teh fridge. working elephants in india are taught to repsond to a large range of commands. monkeys have been observed learning [from each other] to wash coconuts in the sea before eating them. rats learn to push bars and make their way through mazes in colleges every semester…
oddscratch:
Also, I never said beavers don’t react to the environment. I stated they don’t react in the same way that people do.
so if they don’t do it like people do, then it’s not intellegence?? i’m sorry but that is a very speci-centric way of looking at things. it is not up to other animals to learn our type of intellegence, it is up to us to figure out theirs. we are the ones with the communicative skills.
oddscratch:
A beaver can not react to a changed environment. They must evolove into a new species or die.
i’m guessing humans are going to change their environment into in which they cannot live, and thus will die. this is of course speculation. but i’m not convinced that the environment we’ve created for ourselves is teh best we can do. at least i hope not.
my feeling is you don’t give other animals enough credit, and humans too much. but that’s just my opinion.
I agree with dixiechiq. Sure, humans can be taught more, but that does not mean animals cannot be taught anything. Dixiechiq cited some good examples of animal learning. There’s hardwired skills and then there’s what can be learned on top of that through experience. A lot of human behavior has instinctual roots (e.g., aggression, attraction, altruism, and other ‘a’ words :)) that are hidden beneath a ton of learned social norms. Again, I’d say the ratio of instinct to cognition varies among species (with instinct having less influence over human actions than for other animals).
exactly! human cognition is more sophisticated. more than any other species. but on some level, I think it’s also present in other animals too. (e.g., more in primates, less in insects, etc.). The more complex the brain, the less reliance there is on instinct. “Simpler” organisms need simpler instructions for living.
No way animals have the intelligence to learn complex behaviors…
Animals can not learn new skills they can only be trained. Evidence. Animals have only learned these new skills from humans. With millions of years of evolution they have not learned. Don’t you think it would be an advantage to Gorillas to be able to sign complex structures, and yet in the wild they don’t do it. Sure we can modify their behaviors, but they can’t learn new ones. Not like humans can. There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between our levels of intellegence, it’s not just a matter of degree. Again I submit that people can react to a changed environment.
If you took a person from 20,000 years ago at the age of 2 and raised them in our environment they would do just fine. Same with a prehistoric person. Sure once your an adult your ability to cope lessens, but it is still there.
Oldscratch: You say animals can not learn new skills, but how do you think they got those skills in the first place? Do you think the skills were somehow placed in the original cells 4 billion years ago?
Chimpanzees have been observed in the wild using twigs to do dental work on the gums of other chimps. Where did they get to learn the use of tools? Your position seems to be that lower animals can only operate from instinct or learning from humans. They can learn from observation and more important, they can learn to experiment. Monkeys will clean a wound on another monkey and use leaves daubed in mud to cover the wound. Do you think they have been watching too much E.R. on T.V.? Or could you concede that they learned that cleaned wounds had a better outcome?
Humans also learned to experiment. A comic once said the bravest man in the world was probably some primative in a cave who told his wife, “You see that cow over there and the bag under it? Well, I’m going over there and squeeze the bag and whatever comes out, I’m going to drink”. Or he could just have observed that the young mammals drank from the mammary gland and decided it was O.K. to experiment for himself, (presuming he was lucky enough to get a female). Animals can do the same observation. Perhaps lower animals are not as quick or insightful as humans, but it isn’t that big a jump for the simple stuff.
Animals don’t always experiment well and that skews our observation of them when we just see the ones that have survived. Some hawks never learn to hunt well; some squirrels miss the jump and fall to their death. The fittest survive. The ones who look into a gas tank with a lighted match don’t.
No one has really addressed the issue of why humans produce things like the Mona Lisa and Ode to Joy and Smells Like Teen Spirit, but animals do not <b>seem</b> to produce works of art.
What is it in us that produces those things which seem to speak more to the spirit and tha animals lack?
Kind of like training an animal?
We are born with our natural skills and we learn our social behavior. And we have to re-learn our technology with each new generation.
Many non-indigenous species thrive when introduced to new environments (starlings, gypsy moths, Guam snakes…). Many species are adapting to new human environments (peregrine falcons, pigeons, rats, cats/dogs, coyote,…).
You have some good points, but I just don’t think it’s so black and white. I’m certainly not arguing against the fact that human intellect outweighs that of other species. For that matter, there used to be other species as smart as we are (other homonids) but they are now extinct…due in part to H. sapiens out-competing them.
Tretiak - there is a species of bird where the male elaborately decorates a nest and the female chooses her mate by which has the most “artistic” nest. Other species pick mates by the best dancers in courtship rituals. Others pick by the best songs. Again, I think it is our complexity that allows us to create things like the Mona Lisa or the Ode to Joy. Our complex intellect allows for complex behavior (science, art, philosophy, religion).
anyway, this is a good discussion.
Phobos,
I thoght about animals that “dance” and “decorate”, but these are ectivites that are meant to attract a mate for the purpose of passing a species genes. It seems more instinctual then by design.
And certainly while humans do engage in artistic and creative activites for mating purposes to some degree (how many rock stars claim they were in it for the girls) I think we do a lot more ‘superfluous’ creation. by that I mean creative efforts that are not meant to attract a mte.
But I think that man’s evolutionary advantage of course is our brain. And these activites may be ways we stimulate our brain activity that allows to do greater things. In essence these are ways we exercise our mental abilities.
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No. Animals can indeed evolve, and learn new skills. It’s just that they are at the limit of their skills. Chipanzees can not do any more without evolving. Without actually changing their structure. The skills they practice are skills tat were learned millenia ago. Humans can and will evolve their knowledge without changing into a new species.
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Sure they can observe simple behavior. But, they can never extrapolate that behavior into something more complex. And of course if they can learn from humans they can learn from other animals. But, it’s a simple basic form of learning, one even a human child can surpass.
And just as point of clarification, I do not believe it’s strictly black and white. of course people are just highly evolved animals.
oldscratch, here’s a description of a famous study of the invention and cultural transmission of new skills among Japanese macaque monkeys. I don’t think the evidence supports your idea that other primates are currently “at the limit of their skills” unless they experience some significant structural changes. It’s true that they’re not likely to increase much in the overall complexity of what they do given their current brain structure, but it seems clear that they can indeed discover and transmit to later generations useful new activities: that is, they can “evolve their knowledge without changing into a new species.”
If a primate society is observed to invent and preserve one new pattern of behavior in recent years, I think it’s quite plausible that not all their other skills “were learned millennia ago.” There were probably comparatively recent primate societies that didn’t have the medical or dental or food-related technology that their descendants of the same species now have. We just haven’t been watching them closely enough over the past several millennia to know.
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I have seen chimps strip the leaves off of a small branch and stick it into a termite mound to get the nice, juicy termites. The mother was teaching this to her youngster. Toolmaking?
I have seen chimps use rocks and sticks to attack members of other groups.
Toolmaking?
I have also seen birds break off a small stick and use it to dig a grub out of the hole in the tree the grub was in.
Toolmaking?
I frequently swim with Dolphins and I see mothers bring their pups to ‘introduce’ to us.
They aren’t making tools, but they are capable of leaving humans with a deep sense of peace and euphoria by swimming and playing with us. What are they doing and why? They seem to be having as much fun as we are, and they alter their natural patterns to swim within OUR limited abilities in the water. We aren’t food. We aren’t Dolphins. Why do they like to play with us. They will swim right up and talk to you and listen to what you reply. There is no inter-species conversation, but there IS communication. They recognize speech as a means of communication.
There are many instances of dogs saving their owners from various mishaps. On June 28, 1992 my dog, which was playing outside and was deathly afraid of the basement, ran into the basement and started barking frantically at me. People who are close to animals develop a communication of sorts. You know what your dog wants. Anyway, the dog needed me immediately, so I said: OK, let’s go see! We jumped out of the basement about 15 seconds before the Landers earthquake hit and dropped the chimney right into the basement.
You think what you like, I have no problem with it. But no one ever taught that dog to come in to the basement and get me out. She had never been in the basement before. I know the dog nad no idea what was happening. She had never been in an earthquake. And I know she didn’t realize the implications of the potential structural failure of a 50 year-old house. But she DID hear the earthquake before it was audible to human ears, and she DID come and warn me.
I don’t regard that as being an acquired skill but there may be several other explanations.
Sorry for the off-subject interruption.
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I think this thread is pretty much in agreement now, except for the question of aesthetic and/or spiritual values. It’s difficult to know what animals think, and the only real animal with whom humans have had a philosophical conversation of sorts is Koko the gorilla.
Koko enjoys her time with watercolors but doesn’t have much to say about them. She does, however, enjoy making up new words. (She once got mad at her keeper and called her a “toilet- toilet”.) She once said, (signed), that she liked a male gorilla because of his hair. Could be because many adult males have silver colored hair on their back, or it could be just a point of physical attraction for neat hair.
It used to be we humans were the only “thinking” animal, but as we investigate more, we find we are only “the more thinking animal”.