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Category

Animal minds

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
February 2, 2022
Categorized
Animal minds, Intelligent Design
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At Mind Matters News: How do insects use their very small brains to think clearly?

Denyse O'Leary
February 2, 2022
Animal minds, Intelligent Design
Another strategy, one that enables social insects to engage in complex behaviors, is an established but little understood concept: The colony can have a memory that individual insects don’t have. Stanford biology prof Deborah M. Gordon, author of Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010), recounts an experiment she did, to create an obstacle for ants and see if they remembered it. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
January 31, 2022
Categorized
Animal minds, Darwinism, Intelligent Design
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At Mind Matters News: Can animal behavior simply be transferred into the genome?

Denyse O'Leary
January 31, 2022
Animal minds, Darwinism, Intelligent Design
Eric Cassell: I think it’s such a daunting task to try to explain how something is sophisticated as an algorithm, particularly a mathematical type of algorithm, could have evolved in the first place. It has to be in the genome somehow. And then that information that’s in the genome has to be encoded in a neural network when the brain develops, and then it all has to be run, as the animal is performing the behavior. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
January 28, 2022
Categorized
Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Neuroscience
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At Mind Matters News: Neuroscience mystery: How do tiny brains enable complex behavior?

Denyse O'Leary
January 28, 2022
Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Neuroscience
Eric Cassell notes that insects with brains of only a million neurons exhibit principles found only in the most advanced man-made navigation systems. How? Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
January 17, 2022
Categorized
Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Neuroscience
Tagged
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At Mind Matters News: Did the octopus really know she was dying? Was she trying to say goodbye?

Denyse O'Leary
January 17, 2022
Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Neuroscience
It's an interesting fact that intelligence in animals is not nearly as firmly fixed in a hierarchy of evolution as we used to believe. Octopuses are extreme outliers and we are only just beginning to get to know them. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
December 8, 2021
Categorized
Animal minds, Intelligent Design
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At the Scientist: The spider web as a “giant engineered ear”

Denyse O'Leary
December 8, 2021
Animal minds, Intelligent Design
As Dan Robitzki puts it, they “outsource” their hearing to the web (like the web was a microphone?) Quoted at The Scientist: “Evolutionarily speaking, spiders are just weird animals,” Jessica Petko, a Pennsylvania State University York biologist who didn’t work on the new study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “While it has been long known that spiders sense sound vibration with sensory hairs on their legs, this paper is the first to show that orb weaving spiders can amplify this sound by building specialized web structures.” Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
December 1, 2021
Categorized
Animal minds, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind
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At Mind Matters News: Would cognition in bacteria “dethrone” humans?

Denyse O'Leary
December 1, 2021
Animal minds, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind
Takehome: Of course we can “see ourselves” as an earthworm. But it doesn’t work in reverse. And Pamela Lyon sheds no light on that fact, apart from denigrating humans. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 30, 2021
Categorized
Animal minds, Intelligent Design
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At Mind Matters News: For Ants, Building a Bridge Is No “Simple” Task

Denyse O'Leary
November 30, 2021
Animal minds, Intelligent Design
Richard Stevens: Cassell shows that animal algorithms must be designed top-down starting with a goal, fashioning the data input sensors, developing the necessary procedures, and implementing them in software to direct hardware. Yet the Quanta Magazine piece reported that Panamanian army ants’ procedures for building bridges of living ants is accomplished using a “simple algorithm.” Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 29, 2021
Categorized
Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism
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At Mind Matters News: Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism

Denyse O'Leary
November 29, 2021
Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism
Panpsychism eliminates the crudities of Darwinism. For example, if consciousness is assumed to be a natural development in the most complex life forms, human consciousness would have happened, whether it improved survival or not. Darwinian controversies on the topic become pointless or anyway, much less significant. Perhaps that’s why a classical Darwinian, who needs to see human consciousness as a simple but controversial accident, views panpsychism with hostility. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 16, 2021
Categorized
Animal minds, Information, Intelligent Design
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Book excerpt: Navigational genius of insects

Denyse O'Leary
November 16, 2021
Animal minds, Information, Intelligent Design
Eric Cassell: The Goulds call this curious dance “the second most information-rich exchange in the animal world,”5 second only to human language. That is quite a statement considering the communication is by insects with only 950,000 neurons, compared to humans with about eighty-five billion. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 9, 2021
Categorized
Animal minds, Darwinism, Intelligent Design
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At Mind Matters News: The intelligence birds and bees naturally have — and we don’t

Denyse O'Leary
November 9, 2021
Animal minds, Darwinism, Intelligent Design
Richard W. Stevens: You’re aiming to find your childhood friend’s home in a new city. A map helps; GPS is better. Accessing all that previously-acquired mapmakers’ knowledge, employing all of that satellite, radio and computing technology, you’ll probably (although not certainly) reach your goal. Could some “dumb bird” do any better? Way better, actually. Read More ›