Thread: Wired Science: Fish Photographed Using Tools to Eat

The distinction that needs to be made is between evolutionary intelligence and individual intelligence.

As far as I know though, evolutionary neuroscience is extremely poorly understood. Somebody please contradict me.

But anyway, here's what I mean: there's a species of wasp which digs holes, before laying its eggs in a caterpillar and dragging the caterpillar into its hole. The exact way it does this is depositing the caterpillar on the edge, then going in the hole and checking everything's okay, then pulling the caterpillar in. However, if you move the caterpillar a short distance away, the wasp when emerging from the hole pulls the caterpillar back to the edge, and then goes through the entire checking cycle again. This illustrates the wasp has no conceptualisation of what it's actually doing and why it's doing it, let alone having the ability to form a novel plan. Apparently the brain of the wasp evolved this checking mechanism by a random mutation (this is the totally mysterious bit I alluded to; I don't think anybody has any idea about the paths of causation between mutated protein and a singular new novel behaviour; I'm not aware of any knowledge at all, in fact, of how DNA codes for neural structures. In fact I don't think the basic mechanism of axon creation is even understood) and then the gene quickly spread due to the increased reproduction rate it bestows.

A more advanced type of intelligence is correlation-based intelligence. Philosopher's ducks have this. I'd imagine all mammals and many birds have it. With this intelligence, if an organism repeatedly sees instances of A (a pack) alongside instances of B (bread), it comes to identify them. Essentially we're talking about pattern recognition acting on instances. Thinking about it, perhaps this originally came from a mutation causing visual pattern recognition (present in much simpler animals) to expand into all brain areas. Anyway, this kind of intelligence is very useful because it allows organisms to instantly be able to respond to new situations in environments, rather than the ducks having to die ten thousand times until one of them gets the right mutation; by which time the park doesn't exist any more anyway.

The next level of intelligence, after conceptual object creation, is internal conceptual object manipulation. This is advanced and only a very small number of animals can be shown to have it in basic quantities; crows, elephants, etcetera. With this type of intelligence, animals do not observe correlations, but rather, they combine the existing symbols (results of correlations) in their heads until they visualise a solution, and create entirely new instances; for example, the elephants using the concept of 'stick', and indeed the concept of 'elephant', and realising if they attached it to their trunks they could scratch new areas.

I think it's possible that humans don't have a qualitatively different type of intelligence, biologically; I think perhaps cultural development instead could have become a self-sustaining process, developing exponentially via feedback (education). How intelligent is a feral human? And perhaps this happened to us rather than anything else due to obvious morphological anomalies.

With respects to the fish though, the jury is out for me. I don't see how, underwater, a fish could ever see enough instances of using inertia to break things to form the general symbol and thus, if it has intelligence of the third type, break the shell. I find it more credible that it could be intelligence of the wasp's type. This could be settled by a few clever experiments, though.

Lol.

Yes, yes, of course our intelligence is more bettererer.

I don't see how you can really distinguish between these.
Your genes code how you think. Either way.
Along with some environmental factors, which can also change your genes.

What I'm saying is it's all just the basic stuff of life when you get down to it.

I'm finding it increasingly absurd to talk about these sort of things.

We ARE those basic things which make us, those things may be more complex in us, but we're still just following what our coding has told us to do.

So I don't think our intelligence is any different to the bee's. Some of us do things over and over again as well. Even when - and sometimes because of the fact - it's completely pointless.