Dawkins: Lecture 3. Climbing Mount Improbable (7 of 8 )

[victimlesscriminal]

Another consideration is that some insects don't use camouflage for defence. They may emit a nasty smell or disturbing noise, or appear a dangerous/poisonous colour, or mimic another more dangerous creature, or actually

be poisonous. These reasons would be sufficient to explain why the more easily visible bug at the bottom of Mount Improbable has evolved at the same time as the well-camouflaged stick insect at the top.

There is no need to invoke a Creator at any stage regarding camouflage.

[DrMontague]

I seen it on the news. Language has made our memories better. We can put things down in books, video, cd, dvds. Look at all the libraries in the world. These are really our memories in another form. No other animal is capable of that.

[bluecobalt27]

Did Annie's eyes not evolve properly or something?

Look, girl! Look! :P

[BayerLexan]

I beleive in evolution, and therefor can't understand how a skeptic might interpret what Dawkins is saying, but for me he has brought forth ideas that I have never considered would be a way in which something might be coerced into evolving into.

[DrMontague]

RD is arguing that all eyes that resemble the human eye could have evolved in a similar way. There will be variations on the theme, for example, size of the eye. How the each species brain encodes the information from any particular eye is another subject.

[party489]

@DrMontague Keep up the good work and good fight sir.

[im0rtel]

the problem i see here is that the human view and the bird view are truly different. now hes trying to prove his point trough human eyes and that is a misleading fact in this interesting experiment.

[samten54]

Not at all. Both human and bird eyes had been programmed to search for the same thing. Both eyes work in the same way in that they recognize what they are searching for and the closer they get to that object the better they are at recognizing it. So in fact it is an excellent experiment.

[im0rtel]

the problem i see here is that the human view and the bird view are truly different. now hes trying to prove his point trough human eyes and that is a misleading fact in this interesting experiment.

[cgibbard]

While you're right in one sense, it's reasonably easy to see that a similar principle holds for bird eyes, though their vision may be far better than ours. At a variety of distances, they will still begin to fail to see the insects, depending on how effective that camouflage is.

[DrMontague]

RD is not on about views. He is on about how an eye can develop through gradual evolution.

[DrMontague]

I know what your getting at. It's like trying to understand how a dog sees the world. I can see a chair I know it's a chair. It is not a chair to a dog. It can only be a stimulus response to the dogs senses. Look at any object and try to disassociate yourself from knowing it's name and colour etc. It's impossible to do. We can only infer that a creatures been fooled or tricked.

[lesandclaire]

Dr.Mont...

It turns out in recent studies that chimps beat college students hands down in memory tasks. It seems that "Banana" needs less skill than the skills involved in remembering "The long bendy fruit that's good to eat when it's not the colour of leaves or night and is found atop single stemmed trees" for the same object. Language has made our memories worse...