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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (918)	9/21/1999 2:34:00 PM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 69300

- self sacrifice is independent of Instinct in animals? ie is not an automatic behavior but rather freely chosen behavior To answer I must digress a bit. The question behind the question is what is life?. If you look at what differs between the living and the non-living it is that Life consists of information. Information is gathered, sifted by a criteria such that some is discarded and some is retained, and then it is passed on to a new generation.. For billions of years the mechanism for storing this information has been the DNA found in all the organisms. The sifting and selection criteria has been does this information help the organism to grow and reproduce. The learning rate for the information is one lesson per generation. Eventually other information storage mechanisms evolved. These consisted of the electro-chemical resistance between specialized cells. These could retain information aquired by the organism. A memory had good survival value for those organism who could now follow behaviors such as 1) taste food. 2) wait 3) Am I sick? 4) if yes don't eat that again. 5) if no then eat bigger bites next time. There was survival value in being able to remember more and construct more complex algorythms to correlate new data with past memories. Not all organisms could evolve this ability. It was limited to to those who's parents happened to evolve the ability and could only be passed on to the offspring. Some organisms had the good fortune to develop better information processing than others. Humans have the greatest dynamic information processing of all current life on Earth. The amount of information that a human can store in the brain is probably greater than the amount of information stored in DNA. New developments in writing and computers has aided both the storage and in the reproduction of that information. Now the second question behind the question. What is Free Will?. It must be the ability to make a choice based on the information processing. Ideas or behaviors based in DNA have no free will. The decision is made only by survival, too late to make the wrong choice. Free will resides in those organisms which dynamic information processing to make a choice. So, do animals have free will? Yes, A horse can decide whether to eat hay or oats. It can decide to throw it's rider or try to bond with it's rider. It can decide based on flavor or decide based on maximising whatever feeling of love it may experience. Does a horse have as much free will as a human. NO! It doesn't have the ability to confront as many variables or as many memories into it's decision. It's all a matter of degree. TP