BlackCapedManX on 9/5/2006 at 23:50
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
This is really, horrendously wrong. Predators' mental/instinctive processes merely need to consist of "if it moves, kill it and eat. If it tastes bad, find another moving thing to kill and eat." Pack hunters have more complex processes involving shape recognition i.e. "if it moves and is shaped like me, leave it be" but generally it boils down to "kill moving things."
Right, because the actual process of hunting and killing is so easy, hell the last time I checked, all I had to do was look at something angrily when I was hungry enough, and it up and died!
Except wait. Catching and killing something requires the mental process to track, hunt, guess ahead of your prey, gauge their movements, hide, stalk, etc. Not being killed requires the whole thought of "identify that I'm being attacked, and run away." Organism identification isn't that difficult, guaging what is and isn't your species is not way up there on the brian-power min. requirements list, and neither is running away from something that poses a potential threat, which is pretty easy to tell when it's biting your leg. You're missing a simple bit of logic, herbivorous animals don't need to worry about predators to survive, because essential survival requires two things: eating, and fucking (or asexual reproduction for the simpler species). Hebivores eat things that don't move, and you don't have to be very smart to do that, predators have to be at least smart enough to eat things that do move, which means they need to be able to process a fuckload more things than their prey to be able to live successfully.
Look at it this way. By your logic: mollusks and wee 'ittle fishies should be smarter than the octopus, feild mice should be smarter than hawks, rabbits and guinea pigs should be smarter than dogs and cats (which is of course why dogs can learn sound commands and identify owners and threats and learn how to con their owners out of food, and rabbits just fuck, because obviously they are so much smarter than dogs, how could I have missed this?), and cattle and squirrels should be smarter than.. what was that? ..oh yeah, humans.
The only turn around in this logic is when prey can "hunt" and kill their predators, which is why dolphins are so smart (because they fucking kill sharks) and why humans are the "most intelligent" species on the planet. Because, as I stated before and everyone got all indignant about, we kill everything that poses a threat to us. And it's gotten to the point where we don't even hunt and kill our prey, because we've found ways to farm them, we've turned live animals into the food chain heirarchy of plants.
But no obviously you have submitted your intelligence to the ass, which as we can see, far outstrips you in intellect.
SD on 10/5/2006 at 00:16
Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX
Look at it this way. By your logic: mollusks and wee 'ittle fishies should be smarter than the octopus, feild mice should be smarter than hawks, rabbits and guinea pigs should be smarter than dogs and cats
Having owned both cats and rabbits, I can tell you that rabbits are every bit as intelligent as cats, and probably a lot smarter than dogs.
If you want to know what is dumb, it's your argument that carnivory or herbivory is somehow related to intellect.
Kolya on 10/5/2006 at 00:30
As a vegetarian I disagree.
BlackCapedManX on 10/5/2006 at 00:48
Okay, the basic point that drives intellect: the more challenges you face, the more intelligent you have to be to survive with those challenges. It is more challenging to be a predator than an herbivore, because consumtion is more vital to not dying than avoiding oppresions (heirarchy of requirements: if you don't eat, you will die, even if there's nothing around to kill you, so obviously more of your brain mass is necessary to eating than avoiding things that kill), and it is more challenging to eat things that move than things that don't, hence more intellect is required to be a predator. Even if the prey has to evolve to be intelligent enough to avoid their predators, they will only be as intelligent as the predator pushes them to be, and require less active intelligence because they only require a lot of brain power when challenged by a predator, where as predators are challenged constantly in the act of attaining food.
Another way to think of it is that almost always the most intelligent organism in an ecosystem will be at the top of the food-chain. So if it isn't a predator, it is simply that smart because it has found ways to avoid all predators, and any predators that evolve in that food chain will, by requirement, become more intelligent than whatever is at the top of the food chain if it will end up eating it (the most accurate way of looking at it is not that
all predators are smarter than
all prey, simply that all predators are smarter than
their prey.)
Supporting my the rest of my arguement:
(
http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/jan/10dilip.htm)
Quote:
It's nice to be nice, but it's better to be bad.
Yes, take a moment to think that over.Please, do so.
Quote:
On the other hand, and this is where Machiavelli becomes relevant, society also promotes competition between its members, and competition drives intelligence.
While it may not be so blatant as killing, the point is obvious: "smarter things become smarter in the process of being 'better' than other things." Humans are smart for the purpose of defeating other humans, not because it's so "nice" and "kind" to be smart, or that peace is a function of human intellect. And since intelligence is the defining aspect of our species, it becomes apparent that our species is designed to defeat other things, not fucking play nice with them.
Gingerbread Man on 10/5/2006 at 00:49
Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX
By your logic: mollusks and wee 'ittle fishies should be smarter than the octopus
Octopus is mollusc.
Quote:
dolphins are so smart (because they fucking kill sharks)
So does octopus.
Quote:
Because, as I stated before and everyone got all indignant about, we kill everything that poses a threat to us.
Like octopus.
BlackCapedManX on 10/5/2006 at 00:52
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
Octopus is mollusc.
Damnit, you got me on the organism classification. But my point wasn't the species, my point is the fact that octopus are predators, and very good ones at that, and are apparently the most intelligent invertebrate organism we know of.
Hence my point of predadation=intelligence (also, octopus eat sharks, and don't kill them in self defence, which, while I'm not well verse in dolphin biology, I've been lead to beleive that they do)
liquidfear on 10/5/2006 at 00:57
Inline Image:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y229/xxdarkmagus/kraken.gifTotally took on one of these once. Just saying.
Quote Posted by GBM
You honestly cannot move in there, and getting from one side to the other takes about half an hour of carefully picking your way through scrap, usually moving loads of it in the process.
Seriously, that thought really creeped me out (as if the first page hadn't already). You could be moving some piece of equipment, some door, and BAM! right out of the junk next to your right leg, the spider fucking leaps out and hugs your calf. Or something.
But I still really wanna know what the hell it is....
Agent Monkeysee on 10/5/2006 at 01:02
My own personal pet theory is that intelligence is a side-effect of social organizations. Well not quite as passive as a side-effect. More like the two go hand-in-hand but the environment is driving the social side of it and the social behavior is driving the intelligence growth which helps feed further socialization and it's all very complicated as evolution tends to be.
But I think you see my point.
The predator connection is a bit more removed in that predatory behavior often requires coordination among individuals and therefore requires more complex social behavior than most herbivores whos most extensive social behavior is "mass together and act scared but look big". But it's not so much that being a predator inherently requires more intelligence but that being a predator, under certain circumstances, requires better coordination among individuals which requires better social systems.
Anyway the point is you look at any animal we consider intelligent you'll find either a complex social system accompanying it or a recent ancestor that exhibited one. Predator=intelligent is a bit too glib, especially if you consider that the most effective predators tend to not be all that intelligent so much as they are intuitively clever and aggressive and that the most intelligent animals, including us, don't actually exhibit efficient or particularly effective predatory behavior. The shark is a better predator than the dolphin. I think it's a stretch to classify any of the primates as predators. They're omnivores with a whole new bag of environmental tricks, most of which aren't directed at effecting better predatory behavior so much as implementing better behavior strategies in general.
The only thing that doesn't explain, in fact, is the octopus but I'm not sure the octopus is intelligent so much as crafty which is a bit different.
SD on 10/5/2006 at 01:03
Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX
Okay, the basic point that drives intellect: the more challenges you face, the more intelligent you have to be to survive with those challenges. It is more challenging to be a predator than an herbivore, because consumtion is more vital to not dying than avoiding oppresions (heirarchy of requirements: if you don't eat, you will die, even if there's nothing around to kill you, so obviously more of your brain mass is necessary to eating than avoiding things that kill), and it is more challenging to eat things that move than things that don't, hence more intellect is required to be a predator. Even if the prey has to evolve to be intelligent enough to avoid their predators, they will only be as intelligent as the predator pushes them to be, and require less active intelligence because they only require a lot of brain power when challenged by a predator, where as predators are challenged constantly in the act of attaining food.
Have you got any scientific evidence to back all this up, or is it just stuff you're pulling out of your ass?
Admittedly, I only have a degree in this shit, so they might have missed this bit off the syllabus.
Having said that, I do recall some pretty complex predator avoidance techniques employed by prey organisms which would lead me to believe that their brains are pretty well-developed. And sue me if, in my experience, I've observed that predators typically prey on the old and sick individuals in a population rather than the stupid ones.
So yeah, any sort of science would be nice.
Quote Posted by Agent Monkeysee
The predator connection is a bit more removed in that predatory behavior often requires coordination among individuals and therefore requires more complex social behavior than most herbivores whos most extensive social behavior is "mass together and act scared but look big".
I don't agree at all. Quite apart from the fact that most predators work alone, thus negating any need for complex social behaviour, there are hundreds of recorded examples of very complex social interactions among prey populations. Certainly way more complex than "look big" anyway.
Agent Monkeysee on 10/5/2006 at 01:12
Quote Posted by Strontium Dog
I don't agree at all. Quite apart from the fact that most predators work alone, thus negating any need for complex social behaviour, there are hundreds of recorded examples of very complex social interactions among prey populations. Certainly way more complex than "look big" anyway.
Yeah most predators work alone and most predators aren't all that intelligent. Most predators are clever, but I wouldn't consider them intelligent. Which is why I find the implication that predation requires intelligence to be not all that obvious.
But the predators that DO tend to be intelligent also tend to be organized in complex social systems. Wolves. Whales. Primates.
I don't know what you have in mind regarding intelligent prey behavior. Some herds certainly have interesting avoidance behavior but that doesn't necessarily require adaptive intelligence like the kind humans have. In fact any collective behavior is suspect to me no matter how complex if it tends to be stereotyped and require some critical mass of individuals to actually be exhibited. Also there's a relative scale here. Even dumb old cows are smarter than, say, a pit viper.
