Rights of Nature?

The distinction you're drawing may be rather arbitrary. Note that early humans or human-ancestors began using "tools" that were mainly just conveniently shaped rocks. The Egyptians, in fact, used simple sand and rocks of a particularly hard mineral whose name immediately escapes me to cut stone blocks for their monuments.I would certainly count that as "tool use," yet I wouldn't say that the tools were "made" in the human artifice sense.Remember that human tool creation is in large part due to two factors:1) We have dextrous hands, even as compared to our evolutionary cousins. They may have opposable thumbs as we do, but they lack manual dexterity. This is a limiting factor in the complexity of tools that an organism can physically fashion, while the limiting factor on what can be used as a tool is still a function of intelligence and creativity. A raven that can recognize the behavior of automobiles at traffic lights and use that predictive ability to take advantage of the weight of a moving car to open nuts is creative and intelligent enough to use the stoplight and the car as tools, but lacks the physical appendages to fashion even simple tools itself.2) The fashioning of tools often requires other tools as prerequisites. The root of that chain will almost certainly be found tools, tools that are not themselves fashioned but which are used in the fashioning of other tools. For example, a hard, natural stone may be used to sharpen a softer or more brittle stone into a knife blade or an axe head. A knife and an axe can be used to collect and shape wood and bone into other tools, and so on.I'm having difficulty finding logically consistent reasoning that would make the fashioning of tools significantly distinct from their simple use.After all...out of all the tools you've used in your life, how many of them have you, personally, made?

Again, I think you're drawing an arbitrary distinction here. You're atificially shrinking the class space such that it can only contain humans in a way that does not actually tie into intelligence or creativity, but is rather more limited by manual dexterity.A dolphin could hypothetically be twice as intelligent as Einstein, but would still never ever be able to make tools in the way that humans do. It would still be limited to taking creative advantage of what lies at hand (or fin, if you prefer).But still, even if you want an example from your arbitrarily harsh specifications, a beaver does make his dam. If that's not the fashioning of a tool, I don't know what is. As has also been stated by others, some hominids other than humans have been known to sharpen sticks for use as hunting tools. That, too, is the fashioning of a tool, not simply the finding of a convenient object. Some species of fire ant make roads in the forest, deliberately clearing a path and building walls along the sides. Bees and wasps and the like create complex hives - a structure with purpose-built chambers, which certainly must count as a tool.I could go on.What you seem to actually be looking for is tool improvement, an iterative process of tool refinement. A rock works quite well as a hammer, but it provides better leverage if you tie it to a stick. Sand and stone can cut rock, but a dull copper blade can cut rock more accurately (at the cost of needing frequent replacement).You aren't merely looking for tool creation. You're looking for the creation of a tool hierarchy, where tools are used to create more complex tools in a recursive process.But again - that seems to be limited not only by actual intelligence and creativity, but also by the presence of appropriate appendages of sufficient dexterity. A gorilla can smash things with a rock, but a gorilla lacks the manual dexterity to tie knots, so the gorilla will never tie that rock to a stick.Instead what you see in nature is an iterative process of finding better tools, since the ability to make them is not available. The raven used to simply drop the nut from a high altitude onto a rock to break it; now, it waits for a car at a red light.That process is largely the same - the organism notices a creative way to improve its abilities through the novel use of a tool. ?

I do, too. That's why, while I see a beehive or a spiderweb as examples of tool manufacture, I don't consider those organisms to be particularly generally intelligent.They're idiot savants. They have, essentially, hardcoded complex behaviors that are extremely refined and effective, and yet they are not adaptively intelligent. You couldn't show a bee how to make a new hive.As an aside, I do find bees particularly interesting, because not only do they create complex purpose-built structures, they also communicate in abstract language through the so-called "honey dance." It's not a general language in the manner of recursively syntactical grammatical structure like English or other human languages, but it's still fascinating to see abstract communication in a species with brains the size of pinheads.However, general abstract intelligence of the type needed to analyze a problem and creatively design a solution in an adaptive manner is not unique to humans. Another way of saying "designing a tool" would be "manipulating environmental factors for a planned outcome." I see the raven's usage of the stoplight and cars as a creative manipulation of the external environment for a planned outcome, definitely. The behavior certainly didn't evolve in the way that instinct-driven tool creation like hive-building or web-spinning did. It involves too many complex behaviors in too short a time frame (the bird must observe the traffic light and its relationship to cars; it must conceptualize which lights mean that traffic will stop and which mean that traffic will move; it must establish a sense of timing with which to predict when the lights will turn; it must understand where to place the nut so that the car drives over it). This requires multiple layers of abstraction and the ability to make limited predictions of the future - in other words, it requires planning.What we're looking at, basically, is the difference between intelligence and general intelligence.Google utilizes algorithms that are an example of intelligence; the search engine can rapidly pattern-match various words and phrases coupled with statistical analysis of search history from the general population and predict likely additions to the criteria you've already typed, and even have results pre-cached before you even finish typing.Yet the Google algorithms cannot improve themselves. And they cannot creatively manipulate the environment.A raven may not have human level intelligence, but it is generally intelligent - it can predict future outcomes and creatively manipulate its environment and adapt its own behaviors to achieve better outcomes.Google is like a spider, spinning its web. It's very, very good at what it does, but it can't really do anything else.A raven, like a human, can alter its own boundaries.Other animals are generally intelligent also. There are simply more limiting factors in the specific criteria of "tool fabrication" than "intelligence."