[UA] Crosswords and Blue Teets

[R. Menzi]

---- James McGraw pdytjem at nottingham.ac.uk wrote:

> Not true. Adaptations that confer even a small 
> change in fitness can spread throughout a 
> population surprisingly quickly. An adaptation 
> such as this would actually be a significant 
> enough advantage that it would spread through 
> the population extremely quickly.

     You are talking about learned behavior, not
instincts.  The learned behavior explanation cannot be
satisfactory because there was no examples of the
behavior for the post-war generation of blue tits to
learn from.  Instincts are in the genes, just a
biological instruction set with no need for learning. 
That is not what this is, as evidenced by the fact
that dairy deliveries were fine until the blue tits
discovered this trick.



> I thought we were talking about blue tits, 
> which, as members of the same species, should 
> surely share the same instinctive behaviour.

     When the first blue tit bottle-opener opened its
first bottle of cream, you might say "Look a
beneficial mutation in its feeding instincts" instead
of "Finally got around to trying that on the bottles,
eh?"  That might be a decent explanation, exept that,
if it was an mutation of their instincts, other blue
tits would not have done it too.  It would have been
restricted to that particular tit's children.

     Now, the species was doing fine without opening
bottles, so the behavior is only a minor or negligible
advantage in terms of staying alive - the only terms
that count for Darwinian evolution.  There was no
great evolutionary pressure (eg: lack of other food)
that would cause the non-mutant population die off and
only allow the "mutant instinct" blue tits would
remain.

     The idea that it is an evolved trait produced by
a genetic change related to feeding instincts is also
an insufficient explanation.  There's not a really
satisfactory explanation for it anywhere.  Sheldrake
tries to tackle it with the idea of morphic resonance,
which also applies to why the big bang produced
gluons, and quarks and why the homogenous distribution
of hydrogen began to clump up and form the universe as
we know it.

     He says stuff that has gone before leaves an
imprint, making it easier to for it to happen again,
like ice crystals forming on a snowflake.  In the
first instant of the universe, all the matter and
energy was packed together in every possible
combination that could ever be, creating a morphic
field of the arrangement.  The universe took the shape
it did be order to fall toward the greatest number of
imprints that were produced.

     Of course, with chaos and complexity throeries
added in, even the stranger imprints, the ones that
are incompatable with most of them still impose some
level of influence on the flow of the universe toward
full manifestation of the big bang imprints, simply
due to sensitive dependance on initial conditions.

     My head is starting to hurt from this.



Regards,
- R. Menzi

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