Animal and Extraterrestrial Intelligent Design?

Good post. However, I would argue that in one sense, Dembsky is technically correct when he says beavers use intelligence to construct dams. Intelligence -- in the way most recent investigators conceive the term -- is made up of a wide spectrum of behaviors. It begins on a low end with things as simple as the construction of crystals and the folding of proteins, to simple sense-action behaviors and instincts, to learning, and finally to insight and self-awareness.In this respect, "stack sticks where you hear running water," is part of this hierarchy of intelligence. Perhaps where Dembsky makes a mistake is in limiting intelligence to the more advanced categories of insight and self-awareness. ID, in this view, is more properly an acronym for "Insight-based Design."When we talk about things like determining whether an exterrestrial radio signal indicates "intelligent life," the ID movement views it as a problem in placing something in a scholastic category (intelligent vs. non-intelligent); mainstream science, by contrast, is actually asking whether the signal is interesting in a way that other things we know about and consider common are not. For ID, the issue of intelligence is qualitative, for mainstream science it is quantitative.This also explains the differing views towards genetic and evolutionary programming and modeling. ID views the results as invalid, since the involvement of a intelligence (us), has contaminated the process. Mainstream science doesn't see an issue, because it sees the barrier between intelligence and non-intelligence as artificial and susceptible to reductionistic investigation.As a person of faith, I do not find the mainstream/reductionistic view threatening. However, I do understand the discomfort some religious people have with this view.-Neil

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The main point I was making, however, was that a computer model that produces similar results does not prove that that is how it's done in the real-world system being modelled.

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This is one of the purposes of building computer models. A researcher constructs an hypothesis about how a system performs some activity (e.g. how an animal behaves, how humans do mental arithmetic, etc.). A model, usually on computer nowadays, is built showing how the system might be constructed in order to perform the activity. Both the original subject and the model are then tested under novel conditions. If the behaviours are similar, the model of the system is considered robust. If the behaviours are dissimilar, the model of the system is discarded or modified.For example, a model might be constructed of how an orb-weaving spider which favors parallel vertical attachments builds a web. The web-building behaviour of both the spider and model are then compared when forced to build webs without parallel vertical attachments.

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One of the major failings (for me) in most animal behaviour studies is that humans seem to start with the assumption that only 'we' have 'intelligence', so that option is ruled out in other creatures rather than investigated properly... that sounds like languistic capability to me.

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This was true for some ethologists of the extreme "Skinner" school of behaviourism, but is not generally the case in more recent times. Most researchers are doing exactly the opposite: investigating animal intelligence while recognizing that "intelligence" exists along a continuum from reflex through instinct to introspection. The modern view is that intelligence is neither an "elan vital" nor a behaviourist's black box, but a complex emergent behaviour.In other words, many of your criticisms are valid and important, but they were recognized as such during the development of ethology and are now taken into account.-Neil

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Peter: thanks for updating me...What the computer model does is match the input-output...does not mean the internal computations are the same

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No problem, I just wanted to point out that the majority of researchers are aware of the (very valid) issues you raised and try to control for them. Unfortunately, the descriptions of these controls are rarely mentioned outside of the primary literature. Often, in abstracts and popular reports, only the results and conclusions are presented.The technique I described for varying the input to both the model and the real-world subject are an attempt to make the internal operation of the model match the internal operation of the subject. This is what modelers mean when they use the term "robust" -- that the input/output of the model matches the input/output of the subject in a way that gives confidence that the internal operations of the model mirror the internal operations of the subject.And sometimes, especially for very simple organisms like flatworms, behavior studies do attempt to model the actual neural behavior.One can never be 100% sure of the results, because as you pointed out: "A computer model is a model ... it's not the thing." But that's science.-Neil[This message has been edited by NeilUnreal, 05-12-2003]

Peter-Good points and questions. I want to take some time to formulate a good reply.-Neil