On Thursday, March 20, 2014 12:05:08 AM UTC-4, Liz R wrote: > > On 20 March 2014 15:25, Craig Weinberg <[email protected] > <javascript:>>wrote: > >> It means that birds squawk because they like the feeling and sound of it. >> The intention of using the squawking to convey information is optional and >> evolves much later. >> > > As stated, that strikes me as unlikely, because simply squawking for the > hell of it is liable to get you eaten, or to give away your location to > your prey. So it carries a negative evolutionary "cost" (so to squawk) and > seems unlikely to have evolved *just *because birds enjoy doing it. >
Not necessarily. If the other birds like the squawking also, they may stick around and their collective squawking may drive away predators, or make them more confident and vigilant. The squawking may invigorate the birds (after all, roosters have been used as something of a natural alarm clock for humans). I challenge anyone to come up with one of these just-so stories about evolution that cannot be negated by an equally likely counter-narrative. Without knowing the totality of the environment, exterior and interior, past and future, there is really no way to falsify any hypothesis about behaviors that involve subjectivity. For purely morphological phenomena, purely evolutionary explanations work well, but there is nothing scientific in my view about presuming that life is essentially about survival and work. The universe is primarily decorative IMO. It's about play. The work is in the service of more interesting play. > However, that having been said, it *also* seems very unlikely to me that > squawking appeared because it was useful for communication. Because it > wouldn't have been, to start with - noises can only convey information once > someone else knows what they mean - and of course, evolution can't "look > ahead" to see that something might come in useful in 100 generations time. > Yes, exactly. > > It seems most likely to me that certain sounds just tend to accompany > certain physical actions or emotional states (or both) as a by-product, > Emergence and by-products are Santa Claus to me. The universe is a by-product of the unknown to begin with. > and that for some of these noises there isn't any evolutionary pressure to > keep them quiet (as there would be, say, to stop a bird of prey shrieking > with joy when it sees a potential dinner scampering across the grass > below). So most noises made by animals would start as "spandrels" - > by-products of existence with no significance. > The concept of spandrels only makes sense if there is some compelling reason to expect that some mutation had some initial reason for propagating that is no longer relevant, but in cases like these, when we are really talking about the entire animal kingdom's desire to gesture and make noises, I think it's wayy too convenient of an explanation. > Some noises would, in fact, have an evolutionary cost, and hence selection > pressure would tend to suppress them. This has happened to cats, for > example, for various movements accompanying hunting. Others might be useful > for panicking prey or letting you locate other members of your species, > even if they didn't convey any information except "I'm here!" And some > would be evolutionarily neutral, so evolving a method of keeping them quiet > would be more trouble than it was worth from the viewpoint of a selfish > gene > > But given that such noises existed, over time they might come to be > recognised by other members of the same species as denoting certain things > - hence members of the species "realised" they could get useful information > from some noise their species made (or their genes did, at least). > I doubt it. Useful information is overrated. "*It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.*" Life is experience, not information. > Once that happened, the information content of the noise would be able to > co-evolve with the ability to detect and understand it, and once that > process started, it could branch out into unexpected side-alleys - mating > cries, warning cries, and even in our case a full-blown language. > We use language to convey information, information would not need anything else to convey itself. How could it? We are real, and our language is real, but the information that we convey through our language is only the relation between us, our experience, and our language. We are not part of information, information is a description of what we impart to each other. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
