The crow made the tool; pretty good indication that is knows how to make it. I don't see the difference between the ability to make and actually making it. Both demonstrate that the crow has the information passed along genetically.
Are you talking about the difference between knowing how to do something and being able to teach someone else how to do it?
knowlege can not in any way be transfered by genetics
no, no it cant
an instinct is a preprogramed protocol of emotions and behaviour preformed by a certain being after a specific stimuly
much behaviour that gives the idea that a being already "knows" something is in fact instinctive, and does not, in itself, intale the use of any form of knowlege
instincts stay mostly the same troughout the lifetime, can not develop, are not inventive behaviour, and are basically simple timetested solutions to the most comon problems a certain being of a certain species will most likely find itself in, that work about 9 times out of 10
instinct does not intale being able to produce tools
no, no it does not
performing such a complex task demands of the being the capacity of operational complexity much higher than that of the simple instinct-protocol
howewer the fact that a being displais behaviour similar to other beings of the same species, simply means that the tendency thowards such behaviour is in comon to all beings of the same species
or rather that all beings of the same species have the inherent capacity, both mental and anatomical, to achive such performance
as this is a thing biologicaly inhrent within all beings of a species, any given being will display behaviour within the limits of its mental and anatomical capacity
as such the displayed behaviour will be similar to that of all other members of same species, under same circumstances
more specificaly any being with any given fixed cognitive capacity will, in a given situation, posed by a problem, process information from its enviroment and, alwais within its cognitive capacity, draw one of a number of possible conclusions, that is knowlege, after wich it will proceed, alwais within its cognitive capacity, to develop a solution to the given problem, using all its mental and anatomic abilities, and combining with memories of previously solved problems, and other previously obtained and procesed information
this solution will alwais be within the beings mental and anatomical capacity, wich is alvais relatively fixed, and apears in a certain model, much as the being and the species itself apears and reproduces alvais in a certain relatively fixed model
in other words if you populated a hundred planets with human populations, and made it so that all populations are at a prehistoric cultural and tehnologic level, given none evolve further, on all planets humans would eventualy make spears, use masonry, all cultures would at a certain point develop writing, etc... even if noone taught them any of it
similarly a milion crows will, with some exeptions, fabricate and use a milion almoust identical tools, each basicaly foloving the same, fixed, biologicaly inherent model
not one of the crows is ewer born with a set of instinctive protocols wich enable it to automaticaly produce and use tools
that does not happen
genetics do contain "information"
all sistems contain "information"
whowever this is not cognitively percieved information aquaired trough sentient observation
this is semantics
semantics dont work in evolution
also the behavioral modernity theory is relatively new and still disputed
i dont know much about it and wouldnt go into arguing about it
but it seems to me that all animals have one form of comunication or a nother
in fact all lifeforms obviously have ways of transfering information betveen themselves and trough living sistems, at some level
most mamals comunicate by body language and by generating sounds
theories are that other hominids did not have the ability to use language, as they were anatomicaly unable to "speak"
to me this seems apsurd, as the amount of information and meaning transfred in a sentence should not depend on the color or pich of ones voice, or on weather the basic unit of language used is a grunt or a squeak or a dit, but rather on the cognitive abilities and cultural level of individuals comunicating
all the more reason why humans who already had the anatomic ability to actualy "speak" should not have to abruptly develop language one day, but that language as such evolved as an integral part of any human population, that is, that there was newer a time at wich humans, in any evolutionary form, were not able to "speak"
also it is unlikely that this was an advantage over other hominid populations as they too no doubt had the ability to comunicate vocaly in the limits of their mental abilities, possibly even developing sofisticated sistems of comunication