WI: Two Human species today:

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
 
Broz this is still coming down to semantics. I view the ability to make a tool through instincts (your term) as the same as being able to make a tool by watching someone else, or being taught how to make it. The result is a tool is made and use, and a species that can make the tool then profits from it.

Is being able to learn how to make a tool more useful when it comes to making other tools? Yes. But to my mind it makes little difference if it's genetic or if it's learned. Either way a tool is made and used. Being genetically programmed how to make something is also very useful. You don’t have to take the time to learn how to it and to fail a bunch of times at making it. There is an advantage at being born to do something.

Some bacterium knows how to slice up DNA. Humans know how to do this now as well. Does that make what the bacterium does any less complex? Both are complex processes. One is based on genetic information and the other is based on learned information.

There are two systems for knowledge in this world, genetic and learning based.
Do you know what happened when they took the genetic code to grow an eye from a fish and put it in a mouse? It grew a mouse eye. All these systems are connected together with the same genetic code system. We are all the same; we just have better learning and communication capacity. We are also less hardwired with knowledge than most animals.
Again my basic point is that I believe Neanderthal had more of their tools and ways of doing things based on genetic information and consequently less able to learn new things. Humans have less knowledge hardwired and thus are able to adapt and learn faster. Once we had a way to communicate knowledge to each other we really took off and beat the shit out of the Neanderthals and pretty much everything else on earth.

There is a good article on fruit flies (I can’t find it ATM) demonstrating that if you breed them to learn fast they then have to spend their early days learning instead of doing what other flies do by instinct normally.

Look a human baby. Human babies by far the weakest creature after birth. A baby spends its first few years doing nothing but learning. Other creatures young are much more ready to deal with the world than our children are. That was trade off we made and it’s what lead to our success.
 
but thats not how things work
no primate knows how to make things simply by its nature

knowlege is simply not instinctive, youre mixing things up

instinct is practicaly the oposite of knowlege
instinct is pre programed behaviour
knowlege is procesed information obtained from the enviroment

it is not possible for any form of primate or hominid to geneticaly transfer complex knowlege to its ofspring

it does not hapen

ewer

i understand what you are trying to say, but you are mixing things up

a bacteria does not "know" how to preform acertain task, no more than a kidnei "knows" how to proces urine, or a dvd-rom "knows" how to read a dvd, or for that mater, no more than any part of a brain "knows" how to preform a given function
all these things are inherent, preprogramed, they intale no use of knowlege

inteligent behaviour, or sentient existance of any kind, is made by a multitude of such inherent functions, it is a kind of emergent sistem that comes to be out of equaly complex structures and superstructures of emergent sistems, all made up of such simple functions

nowhere is knowlege involved
that is like saing a nail "knows" how to go into a plank

for a living thing to obtain and use a skill or knowlege it has to use a given set of cognitive abilities, wich in their basic form are inherent
the obtained knowlege is not inherent

if knowlege was inherent that would be as if a population of mice with cut of tails will eventually produce offspring with no tails
 
You'll probably find the Neo-lamarkians to have interesting views on that.

Anyway, I think you are arguing a sliding scale. A club seems a simple enough tool to have some genetic backing. So does the human fascination with fire. Of course the relaxation a fireplace engenders does not preprogram anyone to make a fire, but the interest is there.

Instinct produces emotions that can drive interest. Which leads to tools. So was it instinct or reasoning? Both I expect.

Again people are confusing intelligence and inventiveness which while related are not the same thing. Humans also displayed a long time period where its tool kit and behavior was static. Humans didn't get smarter they started to try and do new things; lots of new things. Including vastly expanding range of habitation.

Michael

You misunderstand me. I was only pointing out that the people that assume reasoning capacity of either sort based on Neanderthal brain size are making a mistake.
 
my point is simply that a being is newer born with any form of knowlege

all knowlege is procesed information

so it is imposible for a being to be born with actual knowlege

making tools requires procesing information from the enviroment, that is it requires at least the development of knowlege, and later replicating same tools requiers aplying existant knowlege

so it is not possible that a living being knows instinctively how to make a tool

ewen if instinct helps, and i newer said it does not, as instinct is obviously one of the basic components of any functional mind, knowlege, wich is the basic predisposition for making tools, even the most rudimentary ones, can not be transfered geneticaly, and as such can not be instinctive, but must be recapitulated again and again every generation
 
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