Evolution stuffs up

[SkepticLance]

My cause and effect chain was probably over-simplified. I make no apologies. Sometimes simplicity is the key to communication.

 

The development of agriculture was probably more an evolution than revolution. It may have begun long before the dates we normally ascribe. I suspect the first agriculture was something as simple as realising what seeds were for, and developing the habit of planting the seeds from the fruit that is eaten, to ensure that the next time the largely nomadic hunter/gatherer people pass that way there would be new fruit trees or bushes.

 

The whole business of tilling the soil and removing weeds, and selecting for good yielding varieties would have come much later. This evolution may explain the time from the melting of the ice before full blown agriculture took off.

 

What agriculture was able to do was supply lots of food for larger numbers of people from a smaller area of land. This could support larger communities, allowing specialised classes of people - farmers, soldiers, weavers, smiths etc. This must have been the first big step towards civilisation as we know it.

 

Another important step would be the discovery of metal extraction and working. First copper - then bronze - then iron. Copper is occasionally available as natural metal ingots. However, the major first step might have been when a fire was burnt on top of copper oxide ore. The heat and carbon would react with copper oxide to reduce it to copper metal. Some paleolithic genius would have seen this and deduced a method of making copper metal. Very useful!

[pioneer]

We forget that farming is a lot of work, especially with extremely low tech tools. One is standing in the sun, tilling, weeding, fighting off the herds and pre-humans who wish to graze, etc., with the payoff well into the future. It would be like trying to get a child to do it. One would need to use some type of peer pressure, since they may prefer to run, play in the fields and eat when it is done.

 

One can say, the task masters forced them. If we go the task master approach, where is their motivation coming from, that allows them to also stand in the sunny field and force teach day after day to a group of pre-human students who really don't wish be there. The pre-human workers want to nap under the tree, like their apes ancestors. Something had to change to get the machine primed from at least one angle. One explanation is humans suddenly developed an abstract appreciation for the long term advantage, giving them motivation. This would have to start within somebody, since there is no school yet to teach the needed motivation. The pre-humans were still on summer break and then suddenly, civilization gets the pumped primed and the machine is up and running.

 

Here is a loose analogy of what had to happen. Let us take a bunch of college students from a big city with little farming experience. We give them a good track of fertile land near a river, but no tools, seeds or instruction. This is actually an easier starting point than the pre-humans. What they need to do is form an agriculture. They still need to eat so gathering off the land may be needed for survival. But who decides who has to stand in the sun all day or who is going to volunteer to look after the mutant looking plants since they don't yet know the best requirements?

 

We often assume tractors grow on trees and the farm sort of works itself. The food magically appear wrapped and ready for eating. The motivation may not have been survival, since this is easier to satisfy with fish, animals, and gathered foods. Maybe a $million prize would give the needed motivation. One gets to fantasize on that prize to keep them all working when the inertial says, lets party. It would almost suggest the imagination began to gain a greater sense of structure. It was no longer free association imagination that ebbs and flows, where today we work, tomorrow we will play in the river, while our mutant looking plants dry up in the hot sun. We compare that to the lush natural and it all seems rather pointless. Why not just fish, gather and play. Someone has to stay motivated with the final goal in mind to keep the students working. Or all need to have a similar goal and motivation. Or it can be where everyone takes turns motivating.

[foofighter]

just another note on how evolution stuffs up, i just watched episode 4 of David Attenborough's newest series, Life in Cold Blood - "Sophisticated Serpents"

 

It turns out that the African Rock Python feeds on Antelope. These Antelope are so large that, although the ARP can widen its jaw to accomodate its prey, it stretches its body so much that its skin tears, forming wounds from stretching its mouth to consume prey. If God created ARPs to feed on Antelope, and He knew they would have to consume Antelope that big, surely he wouldn't have designed a system where the ARP's skin has to tear, and thereafter heal, in order to feed. It just doesn't make any engineering sense. Oh wait - I get it - God made it that way, so that it looks like bad design, in order to test our faith that it is in fact really perfect design! Makes sense...lol

[SkepticLance]

To foofighter.

 

Nice example!

 

To Pioneer

 

Your theory is not necessary. If agriculture developed by a slow incremental social evolution, then there is no need for any special and dramatic change in human genetics. The hunter/gatherers of pre-agriculture days simply move by slow stages over many generations to a life style that includes growing plants and husbanding animals. Once more food is available, the population will grow, which will make the population totally dependent on agriculture.

[lucaspa]

Since the very concept of god is not falsifiable, it can neither be proven or disproven, and I see no reason to add this mysterious, unknowable, imaginative entitiy to our description of nature, as it literally adds nothing but distraction from our attempts to truly understand the processes and mechanisms of the universe.

 

To the monitors: this is not theological, but philosophy of science arguments.

 

1. In science, nearly all entities, when first proposed, are "imaginative". That's how science is done. Atoms were imaginary. Strings are imaginary now. If you say that adding "imaginative entities" is verboten, you stop science.

2. Historically, the concept of deity added to attempts to understand the universe. The motivation for scientists prior to the 20th century was to figure out the "secondary causes" by which deity acts. Darwin's seach for natural selection was to find the secondary cause for adaptations (designs) in organisms. He wasn't happy, from a theological standpoint, with the god-of-the-gaps theology used by Paley in his "watch on the heath" analogy. Theology at that time had rejected god-of-the-gaps and said that there should be some material cause for every process and mechanism in the universe.

 

It is ironic that your dedication to material processes came from people who believed deity created the universe! It was only later that science as a whole became programatically dedicated to rejecting gaps.

 

3. Science studies material (natural) causes. However, there is no criteria to establish whether explanations are complete. Are material causes the only causes? Science doesn't know. If you eliminate the hypothesis of deity sustaining the universe, you prevent us from even looking.

 

Whatever. Tell me ONE thing that the "hypthetico-deductive method" has ever said.

 

In theology, the Documentary Hypothesis of the authorship of the Pentateuch is due to the hypothetico-deductive method. The concept of Trinity was derived by the hypothetico-deductive method. In history, there are innumerable examples. Just one is: at the Battle of Guadalcanal, it was the destroyer O'Bannon that overran the Barton survivors in the water, not the Aaron Ward.

 

The hypothetico-deductive method can be used wherever people agree on what is data.

 

Whatever you call it, it's scientists who make assertions and claims and it's scientists who "say" things. I will arbitrate to you that sience is a collection of methods, as opposed to just a singular method. However, whether method be singular or plural, it/thy still "say" nothing whatsoever, science is not capable of comment, only people who engage in this method are... which is the point I was making.

 

Ideas are independent of the people who state them. An idea is either true or false whether it is ever stated or not. For instance, continents moved long before there were scientists who "said" they moved.

 

Ecoli, people for 2,500 years have been trying to define what science "is" and demarcate science from non-science. It's called the Demarcation Problem. No such criteria, or set of criteria, has ever been successful. Either they leave out things that we consider science, or they let in things that we consider not to be science, or both. Methodology has been tried as a way to "define" science. It has failed. Utterly. I refer you to a short essay entitled "Demise of the Demarcation Problem" By Larry Laudan in But Is It Science? edited by Michael Ruse. It summarizes the problems and failures in coming up with a demarcation criteria.

 

You can view scientists, and I suggest you do, as discovering ideas. This removes the argument from authority you are using: "science is not capable of comment, only people who engage in this method are"

 

What' date=' may I ask, is a more appropriate discipline?

I agree that science cannot nail down matters theological. But neither can anything else. Faith cannot, since most faith in the end is simply believing what you have been told. [/quote']

 

The premise is flawed: faith is not "believing what you have been told." Faith is using evidence that is not intersubjective. Let's take this out of religion. In February I went into a voting booth and voted for the candidate I had faith would be the best next President. I had no science to guide me, but I did have evidence.

 

Most faith is based on the evidence of personal experience. Either the individual's own personal experience of deity or trusting the experience of others who claim such experience. (Remember, most of the time we trust the experience of scientists but don't replicate the experience ourselves.) In fact, I submit that your faith -- "non-belief" -- is based on your own personal experience. In your case, you have no experiences of deity and therefore, based on that experience, you conclude there is no deity.

 

Now, as to what discipline is "best". I would say theology. As flawed as it is, it is better than science for trying to determine these issues. If you read Religion and Science by Ian Barbour, you will find that theology and science are not all that different in how they try to solve problems. The major difference is that theology accepts evidence that science will not. Science limits itself to personal experience that is intersubjective. Theology will accept the wider set of all personal experience.

 

That being said, I think there are currently two ways in which science possibly could falsify deity. I repeat, possibly. It seems essential to the concept of deity that deity creates the universe. IF it could be shown that either No Boundary or Ekpyrotic theory were correct, that would eliminate deity as Creator. Also, it seems essential to theology there is just one time-line. If Everett's Many Worlds is correct, that would seem to eliminate deity, because all possible outcomes would be equally "real". What need for help and guidance from deity if every possible decision is going to be made?

 

Actually, it sort of can. Specifically, the fields of pscyhology and sociology. In my view, these two fields speak most plainly and clearly to the existence question.

 

Not really. The people who claim they can start out with an underlying hypothesis: deity does not exist. IOW, it's circular reasoning because it assumes the very issue you are trying to decide. They try to find hypotheses to explain the rise of religion based on the underlying hypothesis. This can have some value, because it will look at those partial causes for particular religions. But it can't get to the origin of belief in deity to begin with, because you can make hypotheses within evolution based on the existence of deity that will lead to the same result.

 

Here is a related evolutionary question. What changed or evolved within humans, about 10,000 years ago, which allowed the formation of civilization...The next related question is, did happen with a single or limited genetic mutation, i.e.. Adam-X, or did it happen in wholesale quantities all at the same time?

 

You seem to have limited this to a genetic change. There are other possibilities:

 

1. Agriculture can be traced to 20,000 years ago in SE Asia. You limited your sample to the Middle East.

2. New evidence suggests that the genetic change happened at least 50,000 years ago in Africa -- where there is evidence of the first art.

 

So, the change was not within humans but rather a newly discovered technology: agriculture.

 

You need agriculture to 1) be able to have enough food to stay in one place and 2) have enough food production that you can have people dedicated to other occupations than getting food.

 

Staying in one place leads to permanent dwellings = architecture. That in turn requires learning engineering, which gets you to science.

 

Doing agriculture itself requires you to study nature in a different way, which also gets you to science.

 

Having surplus food means that you can have people who do only art, or building, or making clothes, or making farm implements etc. This allows specialization and improvement in those trades. Also, distribution of food to those non-food growers means trade, which means economics, which also means a way of keeping track of a) who owns what land and b) who owes who what in the way of goods and services. This eventually means writing and everything that comes from that.

 

It doesn't follow the same slope as before if we extended the rate of evolutionary process that has been.

 

You aren't drawing a line of evolutionary progress. You are drawing a line of technological process. Those are very, very different. If you make the mistake of equating the two, then that is going to lead to all kinds of fake "problems". Technology advances exponentially, not linearly. So the line you have drawn is representative of a typical technology curve: very flat for a while and then curving into a slope that is nearly vertical. It's a hyperbola. Because hyperbolae describe exponential equations.

[Mr Skeptic]

To lucaspa: I've read elsewhere how important agriculture was to the deveolpment of human society. But the basics of agriculture are not that complicated -- put the seed in the ground and wait. Other primates are quite smart too. Would it be possible to teach a monkey or ape agriculture? What might result of that?

[SkepticLance]

To lucaspa

 

I stand by my statement that most faith consists of believing what you are told. This is why the vast majority of religious people follow the faith of their fathers. A few people adopt other religions, sure. But most of them do it after listening to some evangelist or other. They change because someone has proselytised the change.

 

For most people, though, religious learning comes from parents, priests and the people around them. They choose to believe what they have been told, and this is faith.

 

There will be a minority who have some kind of religious experience that changes their faith, but most are the result of believing what they have been told.

[iNow]

Has heart disease been mentioned?

[pioneer]

Farming is not easy work. After you put the seed in the ground it is 4-6 months before you get anything. There was no Home Depot or books for advice. One has to hoe the soil, lug water, pick weeds, fight off critters every day for 4-6 months. There are storms, wind, bugs, mold, etc., that can also mess it up. There are so many thing that can go wrong for 4-6 months that it takes constant dedication-motivation.

 

It was not the easiest path or the path of least resistance. With hunting you can get food in a couple of days and lazy for a week. The gathering of food is also faster, farming 4-6 months. If we apply the pleasure and fear principles farming is the last thing anyone wants to do if they are hungry now, especially when it is in the development stage and the other techniques are already in production. Try this experiment. Starting today, don't eating anything unless you grow it. No going to store where you can get some immediate gratification. You have no books, no fertilizer, no tools but sticks. At the same time, you need to farm in the summer when there is the most plentiful food in nature for gathering and hunting. Why would someone give up the easy path?

 

Here is my theory, which can be loosely demonstrated with a simple home experiment. Go to the movies and see a scary movie. Then have someone drop you off in the woods at night. What will happen, in most cases, is the imagination will start to act up, with the bush a wolf, the tree someone watching you, the sounds in the night a bear rustling in the brush. It was the human imagination acting up to induce the motivation. They had no choice or the boogie man would get them. Whether it was religion or psychology is still up for debate. The pre-humans were more like atheist in the sense of very pragmatic taking the natural path of least resistance using conservative instinct. There was another group starting to go psycho tending the plants out of fear or nurturing, with the taskmaster in their head. They had a new awareness of self versus something else.

 

The simplest way to explain this is the conscious mind separated from the unconscious mind about 10,000 years ago. This is subtle if one is not too familiar with psychology. Going into the woods at night exercise, will cause these two sides of the mind to appear. If one can remain semi-rational, the body can still be afraid because of the imagination. The rational mind will try to get a grip calming themselves down. Try this second experiment. If you brought a dog to the movie, and he was also put the woods at night, in a different spot, he would not have the same mind split. He would react to the woods in one way, maybe exploring, based on his instincts. The pre-humans may have had this split fade in and out, such as the creative cave drawings. But the humans had this new split stick long enough to start farming. They didn't have a rational point of view, just an awareness of self and something else that made the bush seem to have something in it. They were stuck in the woods at night, so to speak, for months at a time.

 

Some of the mythology were attempts to explain that shrub that becomes a wolf at night. At 10,000 year ago their were not us sitting comfortable at home with old clothes. It was us in the woods at night after a scary movie, alone. There was not yet a collective or group explanation since language was thin for things nobody else could see. But eventually, humans learn to share the woods experience and work within the new parameters. As the new conscious point of view begin to stabilize they started to gain more self control and will. There were now semi-detached from pre-human instinct.

[SkepticLance]

To Pioneer

 

As I said before - your theory, whatever its merits, is actually not needed. There is no reason to think that humans before and after the inception of agriculture were different in any significant way genetically.

 

A much simpler concept is that of slow social evolution. Since all societies evolve socially, this is not terribly radical. Our hunter/gatherer forebears start learning a few basic techniques of agriculture, such as replanting what they had just eaten. No tending, watering etc at this point. Just sticking a few seeds or a few cuttings in the ground to make sure that there will be more edible plants in the future.

 

Imagine they are harvesting something like a cassava plant. This grows very easily from cuttings. So our hypothetical hunter/gatherer finds a cassava and pulls it out by the roots, and pulls off the edible tubers. He/she then idly plays with the stalk, and ends up by sticking it into the ground. On return a few weeks later, sees that the stalk has sprouted and there are new tubers to eat. Word spreads, and they adopt the practise of always sticking the stalk back in the ground. Very simple, but a practise that leads to an enormous increase in food supply.

 

They do it more, and slowly learn how to do it better. If you break a single cassava stalk into a number of pieces, each piece stuck in the ground will grow into a new plant, with edible tubers. They learn to tend the plants, removing weeds. More food leads to higher population. That requires more agriculture and the positive feed-back leads to a change to a more intensive agriculture based society, and less of the hunter/gatherer activity.

 

No change to the people genetically - but a slow change in society, till they are very populous and forced to stay in one place and till the soil.

[Edtharan]

If we apply the pleasure and fear principles farming is the last thing anyone wants to do if they are hungry now, especially when it is in the development stage and the other techniques are already in production.

From what I have learnt about the birth of agriculture was that it started because Hunter gatherer groups remained in the same area year to year. If the group sets up camp in one location one year, then gathers wild grains (there is evidence that they did this - actually that is the "Gatherer" part of hunter gatherer) but then does not eat them all before they have to move on.

 

Next year, in the place that they made camp, they return again, but now find a bunch of grain plants growing in the middle of their old encampment. Nice, easy source of grains, you don't have to even go anywhere (could this be the original home delivery? ).

 

All it would take is one group to be aware of this and they could quickly gather a lot og grain and then leave a lot scattered around for the next time they come. Eventually they would be able to gather enough grain like this so that they had enough food stores to last the times when they would have normally had to leave for better hunting grounds.

 

Eventually they would have noticed that other animals that they liked to hunt also ate the grains. Then all it would take is for the group to keep a portion of their grain product to attract game to their encampments, or nearby in "killing" fields (set a trap for them).

 

Then a single genius could think that if they could attract the animals and trap them, why not trap more than you need now, and keep them traped untill you needed them. And then farming would be complete with both agriculture and aniamls.

 

Naturally, the animals that were easier to keep penned up (the most docile) would be kept and thus selective breeding would ahve started.

 

Also, with grains, selective breeding would start by the fact that plants that producved more grain than other types would end up with more seed being left over for planting and this would cause the grain plants to develop traits that gave more seeds than the standard wild varieties.

 

If you brought a dog to the movie, and he was also put the woods at night, in a different spot, he would not have the same mind split. He would react to the woods in one way, maybe exploring, based on his instincts.

The difference between the human reaction to that movie and the dog is that the movie has abstract symbology in it. Dog arn't all that great with abstract symbology, their mind doesn't work that way.

 

For example. If you were watching the movie Psycho with the Shower Scene. We see this as scary as we can see the abstract symbology of someone unaware of danger being threatened. We understand that the guy is evil (the concept of evil is abstract) and that his intentions is to harm the lady in the shower.

 

To a Dog without abstract concepts (and theory of mind) all they see is a lady in a sower and someone walking towards her. That is so not scarry.

 

So the Dof would not have had a scarry experience to raise their adrenalin levels and so they would not be jumping at shadows.

 

However, if you showed that dog something that did not requier abstract reasoning or a complex theory of mind, then they too would be jumping at shadows in the woods.

 

Ask any dog owner, during a storm (something a dog would see as a real threat) they will get twitchy and will hide and be easily starteled. If that storm is in a movie, it has the same effect and can last for a while even after that scene has passed.

 

So yes, dogs can be scared by movies, just as humans can be. Your example fails because it requiers humans and dogs to have certain mental functions that are the same.

 

Some of the mythology were attempts to explain that shrub that becomes a wolf at night.

Actually, I'd say it is because that bush could have had a wolf in it. So in effect, if that hidden wolf jumps out of the bush, it could appear that the bush just turned into a wolf. And, to make sure that people learn check if a bush has a wolf in it or not, you can make a story up that is scary (and full of abstract concpets ) as emotion (especially fear) are good at fixing new information (memories) in our brain. FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of human brains prove this.

 

You have overly complicated this. The answers are quite simple but the means to answer them have only really been invented recently. Without these devices like FMRI people had to essentially "take a geuess" and they got a lot of it wrong. To cover these mistakes, they made their explainations more and more complex, but we know better now. We have the tools to answer most of these questions.

[SkepticLance]

To Edtharan

 

Your idea of how agriculture arose is basically the same as my suggestion that it was evolution, not a revolutionary change. You simply chose an example that moved from eating wild grains to leaving the grains to sprout. Sure, that might be exactly how it happened, or else something similar.

 

On dogs. I had an interesting experience as a teenager which showed how dogs 'think'. I had a pet Scottish Collie dog. My father had a 22 rifle he used to kill hens for a sunday roast. The dog saw my father kill hens with it. One day, I decided to go for a walk to hunt rabbits (we lived on a farm), and thought it would be nice to have the dog with me. I called him, and he came running as always, tongue hanging out and tail wagging - took one look at me holding the rifle and ran the opposite direction, yelping and tail between legs. Obviously the dog knew what a rifle was for, and was able to create his own horror abstract, purely at the sight of me holding it.

[ecoli]

To Edtharan

 

Your idea of how agriculture arose is basically the same as my suggestion that it was evolution, not a revolutionary change. You simply chose an example that moved from eating wild grains to leaving the grains to sprout. Sure, that might be exactly how it happened, or else something similar.

Your wording here is confusing me a bit.. Are you using the word 'evolution' to imply that the agricultural evolution required a biological change? Or do you mean social evolution (rather than revolution).

 

Either way, I'm not so sure about agricultural ®evolution being a slow change. What does the fossil record have to say about it? I believe that pollen fossilizes pretty easily, and we can compare the relative ages when certain plants were domesticated/improved and how long it would have taken to do so. I don't have data on this, but surely it exists somewhere?

[SkepticLance]

ecoli

 

Sorry about the confusion. I meant social evolution, not biological.

[Edtharan]

On dogs. I had an interesting experience as a teenager which showed how dogs 'think'. I had a pet Scottish Collie dog. My father had a 22 rifle he used to kill hens for a sunday roast. The dog saw my father kill hens with it. One day, I decided to go for a walk to hunt rabbits (we lived on a farm), and thought it would be nice to have the dog with me. I called him, and he came running as always, tongue hanging out and tail wagging - took one look at me holding the rifle and ran the opposite direction, yelping and tail between legs. Obviously the dog knew what a rifle was for, and was able to create his own horror abstract, purely at the sight of me holding it.

This doesn't need abstract thought. The situation was unusual and the Dog might have reacted to such an unusual situation.

 

The Dog would have seen the gun used to kill, so that is not an abstract situation. It might ahve been the way you were holding it, if the dog had seen your father shoot the gun and the way you held it might have been similar to how the dog had seen your father hold it just before he shot it, the dog might have though that you were going to shoot him.

 

As I don't know all the details (and you probably don't remember them and the details for the dog would hav been different than the details you would have been aware of), I can't say what really happened, but from what you have said, abstract reasoning is not needed.

[SkepticLance]

To Edtharan

 

I remember the incident vividly, since it impressed the hell out of me. I was holding the rifle under my arm with the barrel pointing at the ground. This was a result of my father's coaching on gun safety, and I always held the rifle that way unless actually aiming at a target. The dogs response to the sight of me holding the gun was instant terror. This was a pet dog that came when called and rolled all over us with enthusiasm for contact. That occasion was the only one ever, when the dog ran away instead of coming. The dog clearly had carried out a process of 'logic' involving the fact that it had seen my father kill a hen with the gun, and the fact that I was now holding it and had called him.

 

The dog had applied a form of reasoning, in which one action (father killing hen) was applied mentally to another possibility (me killing dog.).

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Alternately, the dog was afraid of the large bang the gun made. He may have associated the gun with a painfully loud noise, the same way my cats associate a camera with a painfully bright flash.

[iNow]

Or, maybe Lance's father used the gun to beat the dog. There are any number of possibilities. I don't disagree that animals use reasoning and are conscious, I am just showing that this particular example doesn't necessarily prove that.

[SkepticLance]

To capn and iNow

Neither of your theories holds water. First, the dog ran away simply at the sight of the gun - I had not fired it. And my father was a big softie. He could not have beaten anyone or anything. Even if he had, he would not have used the gun - he had too much respect for expensive tools!

 

If the dog simply associated the gun with a loud noise, that does not explain the abject terror. Loud noises are common on farms, and dogs get used to them. I had never seen that dog so terrified - its reaction was extreme. Later, when I coaxed it out (without the gun in my hand) it came to me slunk down and trembling. It took me quite a while to reassure it with petting and soft words.

 

There is no escaping the obvious conclusion. The dog knew that the gun killed things. It saw the gun in my hands and jumped to a wrong conclusion, and was terrified. Not a terribly difficult conclusion, or one that required much intelligence, but still a kind of higher reasoning.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

My cat is afraid of flyswatters -- she runs away in terror. Does that mean she knows the flyswatter is used to kill things? No. She could be afraid of the noise it makes, she may have been hit by one in the past (we got her when she was a year old), it could be associated with something similar, etc.

 

I also don't agree that the loud, sharp noise of a gun is comparable to other loud equipment. It depends on how close you were to the dog when you shot the gun the last time, and where the dog was standing. If you had other rifles (far louder than a 22), the dog might not have been able to tell the difference and got scared anyway. Nobody said the threshold of pain in dogs is the same as ours. Wikipedia says a gunshot is 140-170 dB, whereas the human threshold for pain is about 130. You won't find many competing loud noises that wouldn't get you to run away in fear of deafness.

 

I wouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly when there are numerous other possible explanations.

[SkepticLance]

To the Capn

 

No criticism here of your ideas. They are good, intelligent, and well thought out. However, in this case, I have a bit more data than you to go on. For example : I know that on the farm guns are common. Some dogs are trained to hunt and get used to the firing of guns. I have not observed them showing signs of pain or discomfort at the noise. Once they know the gun is for killing something other than dogs, the fear is gone. Even horses get trained to be quite non reactive to the sound of guns going off.

 

We actually had the local rifle club use a part of our farm for their target shooting (my Dad received a rental payment). Every Saturday, the sound of 303 rifles crashed across the farm. All our dogs were used to it.

 

I see no alternative interpretation to a certain kind of reasoning in the dog's mind. Very basic, to be sure.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Unless, of course, your dad shot the hen while the dog was very near the muzzle where it would be incredibly loud.

 

Not that I can really speculate on what other influences there may be. All it takes is something to associate gun to bad (or anything else you were doing at the time to bad), and there are a lot of options.

[Edtharan]

The dog had applied a form of reasoning, in which one action (father killing hen) was applied mentally to another possibility (me killing dog.).

I do not doubt that Dogs can show reasoning (they are quite inteligent). But your example was ment to show not that dogs can reason, but they have abstract reasoning (there is a difference). The way you just described it does not requier any abstract reasoning.

 

We actually had the local rifle club use a part of our farm for their target shooting (my Dad received a rental payment). Every Saturday, the sound of 303 rifles crashed across the farm. All our dogs were used to it.

Well since I didn't know aobut this, then this would offer another plauseabel explaination.

 

If your Dog had been near the rifle range down near the targets, and was not visible to the shooters, then if somone shot at the targets, it could give the dog quite a scare. As they would know what the sond of the gun is and its effects, that could leave a lasting impression on it. As the shooter was somone they didn't associate normally with holding a gn, when it saw you with a gun (an unusual sight) this trauma resurfaced and the dog took fright.

 

Now, I am not saying that this is what happened, but it is a plauseable explaination (based on the knowledge of the incident that I have).

 

I see no alternative interpretation to a certain kind of reasoning in the dog's mind. Very basic, to be sure.

Yes, there is reasoning, but not abstract reasoning which is what was being disscussed. I am not saying that dogs (or other animals can't use abstract or symbolic reasoning), just that your incident does not offer proof one way or the other.

 

My orriginal post on this line of dicussion was to Pioneer. Pioneer was saying that there needed to be a fundamental shif in the way the brains opperate for us to develop agriculture, I was arguing that this was not the case.

 

I was arguing that threre was "Invention" or 'Discovery", but there didn;t need to be any fundamental shift in operation or structure for this to occur.

 

Pioneer was claiming that the birth of Agriculture requiered a seperation between Consious and Unconsious thought processes, and that this occured around 10,000 years ago.

 

In my scenario it only requiers that groups of hunter gatherers noticed a certain pattern (that plants grew where they left seeds previously). Typical Hunter Gather behaviour would then select plants that produced more seeds (as there would be more seeds left at the end of the season and so more of these plants would end up growing and therfore more seeds would be produced next year, and so on).

 

Over time, because this "Midden" crop (that is the new plants are effectivly growing on the middens left from the last year) would offer a regular and reliable source of food, it would encourage Hunter Gatherers to return to the same spot, the would then also encourage the development of that species of plant. This feedback effect would lead to the develolment of agriculture.

 

In this scenario it would not even take any thought/reasoning to develop such crops beyond noticing and taking advantage of such a regularity.

[Sayonara]

There is no escaping the obvious conclusion. The dog knew that the gun killed things. It saw the gun in my hands and jumped to a wrong conclusion, and was terrified. Not a terribly difficult conclusion, or one that required much intelligence, but still a kind of higher reasoning.

Well, there is "escaping". In the form of alternate possibilities. You don't demonstrate causality by picking one example from memory, coming up with a conclusion, and dismissing all other proposed explanations.

 

You have no more demonstrated "higher reasoning" than you have demonstrated that the dog had a great sense of humour.

[CDarwin]

I see no alternative interpretation to a certain kind of reasoning in the dog's mind. Very basic, to be sure.

 

Maybe something else other than the gun scared the dog. Or maybe its just a crazy dog. Anecdotes like this are way too minimal to base something a sweeping as a the presence of abstract thought in dogs on.