Beavers as designers (are they intelligent?)

Beaver dams are amazing objects in our natural environment, being shaped from piles of felled trees and stones arranged to block streams and create ponds that protect these busy rodents [easily up to 50 – 60 lbs, over 100 lbs on record] from predators, allow them to build their lodges,  and provide watery highways for them to move about as they do their business. The dams range up to nearly 3,000 feet [a bit under 1 km] in length, and up to 7 ft [2+ m] at base and 14 ft [nearly 5 m] in height. Consequently, the beavers are keystone creatures, affecting the water table, providing handy bridges used by many animals, reducing the tendency of streams to flood, providing refuges for trout and young salmon, and eventually creating characteristic meadows as the ponds silt up.

This raises a significant question: are beavers designers? (The answer seems obvious: yes.)

Like unto it: are they intelligent?

Thence, what does this imply for other designers, human and otherwise?

These three questions are actually deeply significant, and the answers they lead to are a reason to thank Ms Molch for her question: So, beaver dams have FSCI?

Let’s address this question first.

Beaver dams, of course, do not have in them digitally coded symbol strings or the like. However, as specific, functional structures they exhibit functionally specific, complex organisation.  So, we can reduce such a dam to a nodes and arcs representation that does have functionally specific, complex information, which is FSCI.  That brings up the first point of significance, i.e. an object that is shaped to be functionally specific, and is sufficiently complex implies FSCI. (BTW: It can be argued that DNA is a string structure with functionally specific elements that manifest a four-state per element structure that is or directly implies a code. [Added in response to News, here: The beaver’s genome plainly has in it a program that gives dam building instructions and associated knowledge.  FSCI, which plainly does not trace to us humans. How that comes about and how it gets coded into the beaver’s brain and CNS, is unknown. Empirically substantiated explanations (above and beyond just-so stories) are welcome.])

And of course, to make dams (and for food), beavers also cut down trees, sometimes quite sizable trees:

But also, we need to consider a bit more on Beaver dams. For that, Wiki testifying against interest is a handy source:

A beaver shapes a dam according to the strength of the water’s current. Relatively still water encourages dams that are almost straight; while dams in stronger currents are curved, bowed toward upstream. The beavers use driftwood, green willows, birch and poplars; and they mix in mud and stones that contribute to the dam’s strength. When some of the sticks used in the dam “truncheon” (start to grow) the tangled roots contribute more strength to the dam.

Beavers are known to build very large dams.[1] The largest known was discovered by satellite imagery in Northern Alberta, in 2007, approximately 2,790 ft (850 m) long,[2] beating the previous record holder found near Three Forks, Montana, at 2,140 ft (650 m) long, 14 ft (4.3 m) high, and 23 ft (7.0 m) thick at the base.[3] . . . . studies involving beaver habitual activities have indicated that beavers may respond to an array of stimuli (such as seeing water movement), not just the sound of running water. In two experiments Wilson[6] and Richard (1967, 1980)[Full citation needed] demonstrate that, although beavers will pile material close to a loudspeaker emitting sounds of water running, they only do so after a considerable period of time. Additionally the beavers, when faced with a pipe allowing water to pass through their dam, eventually stopped the flow of water by plugging the pipe with mud and sticks. The beavers were observed to do this even when the pipe extended several meters upstream and near the bottom of the stream and thus produced no sound of running water. Beavers normally repair damage to the dam and build it higher as long as the sound continues. However, in times of high water, they often allow spillways in the dam to flow freely . . . .

A beaver dam has a certain amount of freeboard above the water level. When heavy rains occur, the pond fills up and the dam gradually releases the extra stored water. Often this is all that is necessary to reduce the height of the flood wave moving down the river, and will reduce or eliminate damage to human structures. Flood control is achieved in other ways as well. The surface of any stream intersects the surrounding water table. By raising the stream level, the gradient of the surface of the water table above the beaver dam is reduced, and water near the beaver dam flows more slowly into the stream. This further helps in reducing flood waves, and increases water flow when there is no rain. Beaver dams also smooth out water flow by increasing the area wetted by the stream. This allows more water to seep into the ground where its flow is slowed. This water eventually finds its way back to the stream. Rivers with beaver dams in their head waters have lower high water and higher low water levels.

Another source adds:

Beavers start construction by diverting the stream to lessen the water’s flow pressure. Branches and logs are then driven into the mud of the stream bed to form a base. Then sticks, bark (from deciduous trees), rocks, mud, grass, leaves, masses of plants, and anything else available, is used to build the superstructure. [48] [49]  [50]

. . . . Spillways and passageways are built into the dam to allow excess water to drain off without damaging it. [52] Dams are generally built wider at the base, and the top is usually tilted upstream to resist the force of the current. [53] Trees approaching the diameter of 3 ft. (.9 m) may be used, but the average size used to construct a dam is 4 to 12 in. (10 to 30 cm). [54]  [55] The length will depend upon the diameter of the tree and the size of the beaver. A beaver can transport his own weight in material, and will drag the logs along mudslides and float them through canals to get them in place. [56]  [57] There are recorded cases of beavers felling logs of as much as 150 ft. (45 m) tall and 5 ft. (115 cm) in diameter. [58] Logs of this size are not intended to be used as structural members, but rather the bark is used for food, and sometimes to get at upper branches. [59]  [60]

That is, beaver dams are shaped as arch dams or gravity dams depending on the Beavers’ perception of the stream flow rate. The dams include spillways and tunnels, and require considerable activities to transport components.

The dams are therefore not only obviously quite functional but site-specific, and the structure is varied according to the needs and challenges of the particular site. And to create and sustain such a structure on relevant scales from (mostly small) trees, stones and mud-piles, is clearly going to exceed the 500 bit threshold that is the practical limit for identifying a case of FSCI.

In addition various observers note that the beavers sometimes seem to scout the dam sites beforehand, that some of them seem to know how to fell trees to fall in desired direction [others do not], that they often signal a warning to their fellows when a tree is about to fall, and that they seem to respond to breakthroughs, leaks and over-topping under flood conditions on a case by case, usually sensible basis. (They are not simply programmed to blindly pile up branches etc in response to the sound of flowing water.)

Altogether, a Beaver colony comes across as a rather impressive team of living mini-bulldozers and builders!

All of this points to intelligence, as we can define through the UD Glossary (which is derived from Wiki testifying against interest):

“capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn.”

Beavers — albeit limited — are clearly creatively solving problems and are implementing site-specific plans that solve problems.

They thus seem to exhibit a certain limited degree of intelligence; arguably, they are self-moved and problem solving creatures that work in teams to build significant, functionally specific, complex objects.

{In a later thread, SA2 made some quite significant remarks that highlight the challenges to evolutionary theorising that the beaver poses, well worth inserting at this point:

INSERT 1:  >>Not only do you have to have to explain a developmental pathway for the evolution of a beaver, but also the developmental pathway for the evolution of the dam. The beavers must experience genetic variations that slightly alter their dam-building methods in ways that improve the dams in ways that result in differential reproduction for the beavers that built them. The dams themselves become subjects of trial-and-error experiments, all carried out by unreasoning creatures that started out with no intent to build a dam or the capacity to imagine one or the benefits of having one.

That’s really steep.

But beavers build dams in groups, so the individual beaver that varies in a manner that innovates some improvement in the dam-building process actually benefits all the beavers in the group equally, not just itself, making it problematic for its own variation to outreproduce others.

How might this have begun? Once upon a time did a beaver develop a mutation that caused it randomly chuck a log into a stream, which somehow resulted in differential reproduction? How far must we veer off the path of science to even imagine such scenarios? I don’t think anyone even has imagined them, and I’d be extremely impressed by even that.>>

INSERT 2: >> I would recommend that anyone who imagines such things evolving learn software development and robotics and build the simplest possible dam-building machine that can analyze its working space, gather materials, and construct a dam. Forget all the hard stuff like reproduction, metabolism, etc.

These are significant challenges indeed, and show why the beaver deserves to go on the growing list of credible cases of intelligent design in nature.}

Once that is seriously on the table — and there are other similar cases in the animal kingdom, including especially Dolphins cooperating with human fishermen to share a joint harvest on a regular basis — the sort of “circular argument” objection Dr BOT made in the same thread (as has been repeatedly pointed out for quite some time)  is off the table. Namely:

we can certainly infer that human like intelligence could be found elsewhere in the universe, but we don’t know it for certain so based on what we DO know, humans are the only observed source of FSCI.

You cite the example of FSCI in biology and the universe in general as an evidence of another intelligence that can make FSCI, whilst arguing that the FSCI in biology and the universe must have come from intelligence because we observe humans producing it.

Around and around we go

Not at all.

There plainly are other cases of FSCO/I that point to non-human intelligent designers, albeit these are of limited [non-verbal] forms.

Where this gets interesting is when we bring to bear the Eng Derek Smith Cybernetic Model of an intelligent, environment-manipulating entity:

In this model, an autonomous entity interacts with the environment through a sensor suite and through an effector array, with associated proprioception of internal state that allows it to orient itself in its environment, and act towards goals.  The key feature is the two-tier control process, with Level I being an in-the-loop Input/Output [I/O] controller.

But, the Level II controller is different.

While it interacts with the loop indeed, it is supervisory for the loop.

That allows for projection of planned alternatives, decision, reflection on success/failure, adaptation, and more.

That is not all, it opens the door to different control implementations, on different “technologies.”

For instance, it could be a software entity, with programmed loops that allow an envisioned degree of adaptation to circumstances as it navigates and tacks towards impressed goals. That sort of limited autonomy could indeed be simply hard wired or even uploaded as an operating system for a robot or a limited designer.

But there is another alternative that is now also on the table. True autonomy as a self-moved first (initiating) cause.

For instance, what if the human mind/soul is supervising the brain-body loop by influencing the quantum mechanical pathways embedded in the neural networks in the brain and CNS neural networks? As Scott Calef therefore observes:

Keith Campbell writes, “The indeterminacy of quantum laws means that any one of a range of outcomes of atomic events in the brain is equally compatible with known physical laws. And differences on the quantum scale can accumulate into very great differences in overall brain condition. So there is some room for spiritual activity even within the limits set by physical law. There could be, without violation of physical law, a general spiritual constraint upon what occurs inside the head.” (p.54). Mind could act upon physical processes by “affecting their course but not breaking in upon them.” (p.54). If this is true, the dualist could maintain the conservation principle but deny a fluctuation in energy because the mind serves to “guide” or control neural events by choosing one set of quantum outcomes rather than another. Further, it should be remembered that the conservation of energy is designed around material interaction; it is mute on how mind might interact with matter. After all, a Cartesian rationalist might insist, if God exists we surely wouldn’t say that He couldn’t do miracles just because that would violate the first law of thermodynamics, would we? [Article, “Dualism and Mind,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]

So, different architectures and implementations for such an autonomous designing and creative, goal directed entity are possible. One key difference being in the sources of the goals, and the freedom of choice concerning goals.

And that brings us into the issue of the difference between beavers, autonomous robots or software entities in a game world and men.

Beavers are “instinctual” entities, i.e. they don’t seem to be able to choose a different path in life other than being a part of a dam-building team. Worker bees do not overthrow their queen. Mars Rovers don’t declare independence and set up a robot republic on Mars.  Humans can, and do.

And so that brings up front and center, the challenge that humans seem to be able to think and choose for themselves, with moral responsibility. Worse, it is seriously arguable that worldviews — even those dressed up in that holy lab coat — that reduce humans to programmed entities driven by forces of nature and nurture, end in self-referential absurdity. For instance, we can make the case that: it is at least arguable that self-referential absurdity is the dagger pointing to the heart of evolutionary materialistic models of mind and its origin. This can be addressed at a more sophisticated level [[cf. Hasker in The Emergent Self (Cornell University Press, 2001), from p 64 on, e.g. here], but without losing its general force, it can also be drawn out a bit in a fairly simple way:

a: Evolutionary materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature; from hydrogen to humans by undirected chance and necessity.

b: Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws of chance and/or mechanical necessity acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of happenstance initial circumstances.

(This is physicalism. This view covers both the forms where (a) the mind and the brain are seen as one and the same thing, and those where (b) somehow mind emerges from and/or “supervenes” on brain, perhaps as a result of sophisticated and complex software looping. The key point, though is as already noted: physical causal closure — the phenomena that play out across time, without residue, are in principle deducible or at least explainable up to various random statistical distributions and/or mechanical laws, from prior physical states. [[There is also some evidence from simulation exercises, that accuracy of even sensory perceptions may lose out to utilitarian but inaccurate ones in an evolutionary competition. “It works” does not warrant the inference to “it is true.”] )

c: But human thought, clearly a phenomenon in the universe, must now fit into this picture.  So, we rapidly arrive at Crick’s claim in his  The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): what we subjectively experience as “thoughts,” “reasoning” and “conclusions” can only be understood materialistically as the unintended by-products of the blind natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains. 

d: These forces are viewed as being ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance shaped by forces of selection [[“nature”] and psycho-social conditioning [[“nurture”], within the framework of human culture [[i.e. socio-cultural conditioning and resulting/associated relativism].

e: For instance, Marxists commonly derided opponents for their “bourgeois class conditioning” — but what of the effect of their own class origins? Freudians frequently dismissed qualms about their loosening of moral restraints by alluding to the impact of strict potty training on their “up-tight” critics — but doesn’t this cut both ways?  Should we not ask a Behaviourist whether s/he is little more than yet another operantly conditioned rat trapped in the cosmic maze? And — as we saw above — would the writings of a Crick be any more than the firing of neurons in networks in his own brain?

f: For further instance,  we may take the favourite whipping-boy of materialists: religion.  Notoriously, they often hold that belief in God is not merely error, but delusion. But, if such a patent “delusion” is so utterly widespread, even among the highly educated, then it “must” — by the principles of evolution — somehow be adaptive to survival, whether in nature or in society. And so, this would be an illustration of the unreliability of our reasoning ability, on the assumption of evolutionary materialism.

g: Turning the materialist dismissal of theism around, evolutionary materialism itself would be in the same leaky boat. For, the sauce for the goose is notoriously just as good a sauce for the gander, too.

h:  That is, on its own premises [[and following Dawkins in A Devil’s Chaplain, 2004, p. 46], the cause of the belief system of evolutionary materialism, “must” also be reducible to forces of blind chance and mechanical necessity that are sufficiently adaptive to spread this “meme” in populations of jumped- up apes from the savannahs of East Africa scrambling for survival in a Malthusian world of struggle for existence.

i: The famous evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane made much the same point in a famous 1932 remark:

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. (Highlight and emphases added.)]

j: Therefore, though materialists will often try to pointedly ignore or angrily brush aside the issue, we may freely argue: if such evolutionary materialism is true, then (i) our consciousness, (ii) the “thoughts” we have, (iii) the beliefs we hold, (iv) the reasonings we attempt and (v) the “conclusions” we reach — without residue — must be produced and controlled by blind forces of chance happenstance and mechanical necessity that are irrelevant to purpose, truth, or logical validity. 

(NB: The conclusions of such “arguments” may still happen to be true, by astonishingly lucky coincidence — but we have no rational grounds for relying on the “reasoning” that has led us to feel that we have “proved” or “warranted” them. It seems that rationality itself has thus been undermined fatally on evolutionary materialistic premises. Including that of Crick et al. Through, self-reference leading to incoherence and utter inability to provide a cogent explanation of our commonplace, first-person experience of reasoning and rational warrant for beliefs, conclusions and chosen paths of action. Reduction to absurdity and explanatory failure in short.)

k: And, if materialists then object: “But, we can always apply scientific tests, through observation, experiment and measurement,” then we must immediately note that — as the fate of Newtonian Dynamics between 1880 and 1930 shows — empirical support is not equivalent to establishing the truth of a scientific theory. For, at any time, one newly discovered countering fact can in principle overturn the hitherto most reliable of theories. (And as well, we must not lose sight of this: one is relying on the legitimacy of the reasoning process to make the case that scientific evidence provides reasonable albeit provisional warrant for one’s beliefs etc. Scientific reasoning is not independent of reasoning.)

l: Worse, in the case of origins science theories, we simply were not there to directly observe the facts of the remote past, so origins sciences are even more strongly controlled by assumptions and inferences than are operational scientific theories. So, we contrast the way that direct observations of falling apples and orbiting planets allow us to test our theories of gravity.

m: Moreover, as Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin reminds us all in his infamous January 29, 1997 New York Review of Books article, “Billions and billions of demons,” it is now notorious that:

. . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel [[materialistic scientists] to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

n: Such a priori assumptions of materialism are patently question-begging, mind-closing and fallacious.

o: More important, to demonstrate that empirical tests provide empirical support to the materialists’ theories would require the use of the very process of reasoning and inference which they have discredited.

p: Thus, evolutionary materialism arguably reduces reason itself to the status of illusion.  But, as we have seen: immediately, that must include “Materialism.”

q: In the end, it is thus quite hard to escape the conclusion that materialism is based on self-defeating, question-begging logic.

r: So, while materialists — just like the rest of us — in practice routinely rely on the credibility of reasoning and despite all the confidence they may project, they at best struggle to warrant such a tacitly accepted credibility of mind relative to the core claims of their worldview. (And, sadly: too often, they tend to pointedly ignore or rhetorically brush aside the issue.)

So now, where does this leave our eager, hard working beavers? Bees, robots, and us? END