When I was a kid in school I was taught animals can not think.  Whoever came up with that stupid idea never spent any time around animals in my opinion.

Mom nature has been selecting for survival now for over 3 billion years.  Man has been around for a few million years or in his modern form a few hundred thousand years.  Does anyone think that mom nature just fooled around all that time before man and made zero progress on ability to feel stimuli and react or to think and respond and then suddenly made some huge leap without even inventing any new genes when man evolved?  Now, my bees and my dog are not going to learn calculus.  That does not mean they have zero understanding of numbers.  It seems to me that the only logical conclusion a rational person can draw is mental stuff is a matter of degree, not a on-off switch.

Go read some stuff on Koko the gorilla that has been taught American Sign language or some of the papers about Chaser the border collie or Alex the parrot and try to tell me animals can not think.  Humans are unique in degree perhaps, but not in kind.  Althou on some days I even wonder about humans.

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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