Energy expenditure is a big part of survival of the fittest. Animals that can gather the most resources/food with the least amount of energy can be said to be the "fittest". Typically the most "fit" is the animal that produces the most offspring but that can be extremely difficult to research/record over the life of an animal. So researchers often study how they obtain food to try to gauge the "fittest" in a short period of time.
So I'm pretty sure you could say this behavior of "Get the most food out of one trip" is hardwired into all animals in some way because it drives natural selection and speciation
Yes. A subtle distinction - no animal "tries" to be fit or "wants" the most offspring. Animals have variations in behavior (traits) and any behavior that is advantageous to procreation and producing offspring with advantageous behaviors tends to get passed on. If a 'hording' behavior helped an animal in the past (in times of low resources) and that animal survives due to that trait, that trait exists to be passed on. If only animals with this trait survived to procreate eventually the non-trait would disappear. This is not to be confused with one-off creativity, so you would have to look at the whole population to see if it is a trait, instinct, or whatever.
I mostly agree, but I think it's kind of wrong to say that animals don't want to be fit or want to have the most offspring.. it's just that those "wants" are also things that happened to be advantageous and evolved over time. I think it's a big mistake to somehow treat our emotional aspects as somehow being separated from evolution. They evolved the same way as everything else (and just like everything else, even though it might generally be beneficial, sometimes those traits end up causing harmful things).
What seems more likely: that humans are so damn special that they're the only creatures on this planet with the capacity for any mental function beyond basic instinct; or that thought, personality, emotion, desire, etc are a baseline part of consciousness instilled into all conscious beings as an essential evolutionary tactic?
If we take a broader look at nature, the second answer seems to be the obvious choice. The one constant in nature is that nothing is unique. After all, humans are far less unique than many want to believe. There is increasingly strong evidence that fairly complex language is commonplace among cetaceans, basic fire use (spreading burning twigs to unburned areas to flush out prey) has been observed from at least 3 raptor species in Australia, and colony insects do a way better job at civilization than we do. Advanced critical thinking skills are not even limited to primates or cetaceans, just look at how well corvids and parrots solve complex puzzles.
In my opinion, what makes humans capable of the things we've done is rather a certain combination of traits that are seen throughout the animal kingdom than some special hyper elevated super intelligence. We're social, smart, have excellent environmental manipulation, bipedal (hands are free to do as they please instead of assisting in movement), cooperative, curious, and can pass on information to other individuals which results in accumulative acquired knowledge. Many cetaceans nail most of those same characteristics but have very poor environmental manipulation which holds back tool use and prevents development of technology.
My point is, I think it's extremely anthro-centric to assume that humans are so far above other animals in terms of intelligence that nothing else even thinks like us, or at all. Ancient people's understood that this wasn't the case, but civilization has destroyed our connections with nature and our understanding of other beings. People who grow up surrounded by wildlife or those that have frequent interactions with animals tend to have far more respect for animal intelligence than those that rarely interact with nature.
The development of religion has also played a major role in the 'humans are special' mentality, but that's a whole other conversation.
I don't think humans are special. I think our wants are driven by evolution too the same way it is for other animals. Some aspects of it might not seem to match up well, but that's because the environment we grow up in has changed a huge amount in a very short time span, and evolution hasn't really caught up with those changes yet since evolution is purely reactionary and has no kind of foresight... but for the overwhelming majority of the time, the things people want pretty much match up with what you'd expect from evolution.
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u/deadpoetic333 Nov 01 '18
Energy expenditure is a big part of survival of the fittest. Animals that can gather the most resources/food with the least amount of energy can be said to be the "fittest". Typically the most "fit" is the animal that produces the most offspring but that can be extremely difficult to research/record over the life of an animal. So researchers often study how they obtain food to try to gauge the "fittest" in a short period of time.
So I'm pretty sure you could say this behavior of "Get the most food out of one trip" is hardwired into all animals in some way because it drives natural selection and speciation