Quote: Original post by taby
The wasps never tried to gain entrance to the house, though there was nothing physically stopping them.

They all went straight for the A&W Rootbeer, no questions asked. That cannot possibly be fully instinctual.

I don't follow your reasoning as to why that can't be fully instinctual behavior. The wasps found a readily accesible source of food; why would they go further?

Quote: Original post by me22

Quote: Original post by GDKnight
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Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
so there was actually significant evolutionary pressure to evolve intelligence.

I like that. What do you mean exactly when you say "evolutionary pressure" ?

In the case of bats, they not only evolved a system for echo-location, they also became blind.

The question is: Is the fact of becoming blind the cause for the echo-location system being developed? Or they just were lucky and were victims of a mutation that developed the whole system exactly when they became blind?

Maybe they already had the echo-location system and they just had a mutation that left them blind, which was of little impact on their survival capabilities beacause they were already based on the echo-location system.

Or maybe the fact of not using their eyes made their visual system become atrophied and this atrophy was registered and passed to the next generations.

About the experiences being passed onto the next generations... I didn't mean to say exactly a "mental-recall", I was most talking about a biological one. You see, the organic structure of a horse in the moment of being born allows the horse to stand up and "walk" (sp?) around automatically. While in the case of humans, not. We need to learn and to exercise how to walk first, we need to aquire experience.

So, what for humans is a behavior that needs development, for horses it comes already developed. It's an inborn behavior.

If the "walking" ability can come already developed, why not the "avoiding obstacles" ability, or the "build a complex nest" ability too?

[Edited by - owl on December 1, 2005 10:17:16 PM]

Quote: Original post by owl

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
so there was actually significant evolutionary pressure to evolve intelligence.

I like that. What do you mean exactly when you say "evolutionary pressure" ?

In the case of bats, they not only evolved a system for echo-location, they also became blind.

The question is: Is the fact of becoming blind the cause for the echo-location system being developed? Or they just were lucky and were victims of a mutation that developed the whole system exactly when they became blind?

Maybe they already had the echo-location system and they just had a mutation that left them blind, which was of little impact on their survival capabilities beacause they were already based on the echo-location system.

Or maybe the fact of not using their eyes made their visual system become atrophied and this atrophy was registered and passed to the next generations.

About the experiences being passed onto the next generations... I didn't mean to say exactly a "mental-recall", I was most talking about a biological one. You see, the organic structure of a horse in the moment of being born allows the horse to stand up and "walk" (sp?) around automatically. While in the case of humans, not. We need to learn and to exercise how to walk first, we need to aquire experience.

So, what for humans is a behavior that needs development, for horses it comes already developed. It's an inborn behavior.

If the "walking" ability can come already developed, why not the "avoiding obstacles" ability, or the "build a complex nest" ability too?

I don't think all bats are completely blind, just extremely poor eyes sight, because they spend most of their time in the dark, they don't need good eyesight, so that wouldn't really be a factor in their evolution.
So if there was one with great eye sight and another with poor, neither would have an advantage over the other.

The echo/location system would have been evolved in their current environments and those genes might be linked to their eye sight but more likely because eyesight had little use compared to their sonar.

I think because the newly born horses would die if they couldn't walk... as they would be left behind, etc.

Human babies can't walk etc when they're born because we come out underdeveloped compared to other animals, as our heads would grow far too big for us to get out if we were to be in the womb longer.

edit:
if our experiences are in some way encoded into our genes for future generations' inborn behaviour, there would have to be some kind of biological link from our brains to our nether regions.................................

Quote: Original post by johnnyBravo
if our experiences are in some way encoded into our genes for future generations' inborn behaviour, there would have to be some kind of biological link from our brains to our nether regions.................................

It feels like they do. Actually, to the entire nervous system...

Really interesting discussions here!
I'll adress both:

On experiments:
I always do non-evil experiments with animals. This one is very interesting, I would expect the ant to go in circles around the shampoo forever. Bravo for the brave explorer ant. This sorta trashes my previous belief that ants were purely reactive.
Reactive behaviour would expressly forbid to go straight for a harmful thing. The ant didn't know if it even was going to be an exit at all, just decided it was worth a shot, since nothing else was working.
My favorite non-evil experiment on dogs is the mirror test. See if they can get over the "other dog" (first point) and then after dismissing the image, see if they can learn to use the mirror as a tool (second point!) to widen their field of view. Then see if they learn to look at themselves (third and final point). My late female dog learned how to recognize herself in pictures and video. Such a poser, that dog.

On evolution:

Quote: Original post by johnnyBravo
Human babies can't walk etc when they're born because we come out underdeveloped compared to other animals, as our heads would grow far too big for us to get out if we were to be in the womb longer.

I believe that human babies are so defenseless because of our species' trait of helping delivery. Babies don't need to be strong at birth. Thus, they aren't.

On Game Development:

Quote: Original post by owl
But I can't imagine one that is able to sintetize a whole (timed) experience. Shocking.

If you're using Neural nets or Markov models you could store the weights and pre-seed the newborn's brain with them. Give it the weight and a decent number of samples to go aganist, so it won't be erased after the first re-learning phase. Say, if training consists of 50 passes, make the pre-weight count as 25 more passes.

For what it's worth... (I'm not getting into the quotefest!)

a) Each of the cells in your body carries about 1.5 gigabytes of genetic information in your DNA. Just a neat statistic. :)

b) Cockroaches haven't changed all that much in the last 200-350 million years. They were here before the dinosaurs, in the Carboniferous Period.

c) There isn't all that much difference between a monkey and an engineer. I have seen with my own eyes a mountain gorilla in a zoo look at some berries, tear off a branch, strip it of excess twigs, and use it to snag a branch close enough to its cage to get a snack. Use *and* invention of a tool, to solve a problem. Monkeys can learn to speak through sign language: communication of ideas. Compared to an engineer, it's just a matter of scope.

Quote: Original post by Madster
If you're using Neural nets or Markov models you could store the weights and pre-seed the newborn's brain with them. Give it the weight and a decent number of samples to go aganist, so it won't be erased after the first re-learning phase. Say, if training consists of 50 passes, make the pre-weight count as 25 more passes.

That's a pretty elocuent analogy :)

Quote: Original post by Tok
There isn't all that much difference between a monkey and an engineer.

Well, yes and no. I won't argue with you about this, at one end you're right, I've also read about monkeys using tools but, on the other hand, being so many monkeys in this world (and so many creatures in heart's lifetime), only one is building giant pyramids for the all-mighty gods. :)

I really don't know how much worth it will be to extend this thread any futher, but it has been one of the most interestings discussions I've had here so far.

Thank you everyone for sharing your time with me!

Quote: Original post by owl

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
so there was actually significant evolutionary pressure to evolve intelligence.

I like that. What do you mean exactly when you say "evolutionary pressure" ?

In the case of bats, they not only evolved a system for echo-location, they also became blind.

The question is: Is the fact of becoming blind the cause for the echo-location system being developed? Or they just were lucky and were victims of a mutation that developed the whole system exactly when they became blind?

Maybe they already had the echo-location system and they just had a mutation that left them blind, which was of little impact on their survival capabilities beacause they were already based on the echo-location system.

Or maybe the fact of not using their eyes made their visual system become atrophied and this atrophy was registered and passed to the next generations.

About the experiences being passed onto the next generations... I didn't mean to say exactly a "mental-recall", I was most talking about a biological one. You see, the organic structure of a horse in the moment of being born allows the horse to stand up and "walk" (sp?) around automatically. While in the case of humans, not. We need to learn and to exercise how to walk first, we need to aquire experience.

So, what for humans is a behavior that needs development, for horses it comes already developed. It's an inborn behavior.

If the "walking" ability can come already developed, why not the "avoiding obstacles" ability, or the "build a complex nest" ability too?

generally as soon as a previously advantageous feature is unnecessary it becomes a liability. if you can do everything perfectly without using your eyes it becomes BETTER to reduce the capabilities of the eyes than to have your body and brain spend energy on them. (human intelligence for example is not something that would be advantageous to most creatures since the cost of supporting a large brain is very large and in many cases the species is better off if the energy is spent on other organs such as the muscles and lungs (to run longer/faster).

bats have evolved into night creatures and as such their echo-radar is more effective than even the best night vision. and by reducing the capabilities of the eyes more energy could be spent on the better solution (why waste energy on having the brain analyze information from both eyes and ears when the ears work even without any light) (it was probably able to use both at one time but as one evolved the need for the other was reduced)

I thought this would be an interesting addition to the topic. This is a recent article from New Scientist magazine.

Quote:
FOR an animal with a brain the size of a pinhead, the honeybee possesses remarkable mental abilities. It has already been shown that they can count; now it seems they can recognise human faces.

Adrian Dyer of the University of Cambridge and colleagues trained honeybees to associate a sucrose drink with a photograph of a particular face. The insects were then tested on their memory and recognition skills by being presented with the picture of this face and the pictures of three other faces not associated with any reward.

Of the seven bees tested, two lost interest in the trial and flew away. But the five remaining bees correctly identified the target face in more than 80 per cent of trials, even though the reward had been removed. Moreover, some bees remembered the face two days later, indicating that they had formed a long-term memory of it. Not bad for a creature whose brain contains a thousandth the number of neurons we have in our retina alone.

"Specialised neuronal circuitry is certainly not required," says Lars Chittka from Queen Mary, University of London, who worked on the project and believes it could have implications for the development of AI systems."

New Scientist, December 10 issue (publicly available at http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg18825295.100)

Looks as though there can be a lot of power in relatively small neural networks.