Earthborn said:
You could analyse a spider's entire genome, and you'll find nothing that describes how it should weave a web. It's webweaving behaviour is a reaction to its environment. It's not pre-programmed.
I don't understand how you can say this. We don't understand genes enough to know exactly what role they play in behavioral tendencies.
Furthermore, I don't see how you can say the spider weaves its web strictly in reaction to its environment. Giz is right to say that web-weaving is not learned behavior. Put a young spider of a species that weaves webs in a jar or in a box or in a closet, and it will weave a web so that it can trap food.
The giant octopus is not cared for by its parents. 100,000 eggs may hatch, and each of the newly hatched octopii will immediately swim for the surface to live as plankton for a few weeks or months. There is no parent or model around to teach them this behavior. The only environment in which they could live is in the ocean, so does it make much sense to divorce their innate trait to swim to the surface from the environment in which they do it? How else is a young octopus to live at all? If you suggest that the tiny octopus is simply reacting to the pull of gravity or to the sunlight above, then sure, I'll agree with that much. Nevetheless, it's reaction is indeed programmed, rather than learned. To be programmed, that program has to come from somewhere. Biologically, the only place it can come from is its genes.
I'm with Giz. There are genetically programmed behavioral traits. They can be fought, suppressed, or remain dormant, but they're there.
Some people believe animals should not suffer if that suffering can be prevented. It is only logical for such people to wish an end to predation when it is achievable.
No, it isn't logical at all. It's premised on a fundamentally flawed understanding of ecosystems and the complex relationships among various species of animal predators, prey animals, omnivores, plant species, dirt, wind, rain, oceans, the upper atmosphere, the sun, the moon, and a host of other factors. The entire notion of "ending suffering" is a childish and fanciful ideal that ignores the complex interdependency among the elements of large ecosystems.
We have no idea how a future people chosing to end predation will chose to define it.
We also have no reason to believe that a future people would choose such a goal. I submit that the more we learn about the interdependence of life on such factors as ocean currents, sandstorms in the Sahara, and other occurrences seemingly unrelated to any given ecosystem, the less likely we will see any value at all in toying with ecosystems more than we happen to do now inadvertently simply because of economic forces present in our human civilizations.
Life on earth as one giant ecosystem is far more complex than we could possibly hope to model at any time in the present or in the future. To posit that we could control it while retaining as much of its biodiversity as might be reasonably acceptable is foolish. Modeling complex systems with billions or even trillions of variables is impossible on any practical scale for the foreseeable continued existence of mankind.
We can gather data for hundreds or even thousands of variables regarding the behavior of buyers and sellers in a stock market. Very sophisticated mathematical models have been invented and employed, and yet not one has been able to consistently predict market behavior as a whole for any significant length of time. The mathematics is too difficult to implement on a practical level and perturbations appear fairly early on in any system, upsetting the balance of the whole system (and our understanding of it with it), thus yielding further predictions impossible.
The complexity of a biodiverse large ecosystem is greater by many orders of magnitude than any model ever devised of the stock markets. We simply could not solve the problem using mathematical models.
Thus, any deliberate attempts we might make in the future to "control" entire sufficiently biodiverse ecosystems would yield results vastly different from anything we could predict. Effectively, we would be shooting in the dark. We could easily "control" ourselves out of existence by destroying something vital to our survival. Indeed, I would argue that we likely would control ourselves out of existence if we tried to do something as grand as end predation.
Here's a nice example: people used to be horrified at the idea that people could be watched with cameras everywhere they go or had tracking chips implanted to track them. Lots of people still do, but these values are changing. More and more cameras are popping up all over the place to monitor misbehaviour and largely because people demand increased security. In Japan, there are already companies that implant children so they can be tracked to the benefit of their worried parents. What was once a sci-fi horror scenario, now gives people a warm and fuzzy feeling.
This isn't even comparable. As horrifying as I find your examples of cameras and security chip implants, I recognize that these are things which are technologically available today and which are being embraced and adopted by certain segments of society in certain cultures (They're embracing chip ID implants in Mexico too). "Controlling" our entire planet's system of biodiversity is far beyond our capacity, however, now or at any time in the future due to its vastly greater complexity.
Even if our knowledge of the relationships of all the conceivable variables involved could approach anything near parity with the actual variables involved, change would occur during the time we were learning about it. The variables themselves would change faster than our knowledge could keep up. This is because of the continued evolution of life, and also because of ever-changing climactic conditions, the movement of the tectonic plates, magnetic drift, volcanic activity, the melting and freezing of glacial and polar ice, the fluctuations in the size of the large deserts, changes in rivers and streams and lakes, and countless other non-biological environmental elements, not to mention changes which might be due to extra-terrestial objects such as earth-crossing asteroids or comets, our own moon, and changes in the sun's activity. The same would be true of the time it would take a future, hypothetical people to develop technology to control the earth's biosystems. Those biosystems would change so that the technology would be rendered at least partially obsolete once it were available. It would never catch up with change.
Stopping predation does seem horrific to most of today's people. So do a lot of other things that may happen in the future. Just because you are horrified by the idea now, does not mean your great-grand children will not think about the issue completely differently.
This much I can agree with. I certainly hope future generations will grasp that the entire earth biosystem, situated in a complex solar system, is simply ever-changing and vastly too complex to be controllable by humans.
Are lions in the zoo "happy" ? I haven't got the foggiest. I also dont know whether they would prefer expending a lot of energy to hunt their own food instead of getting it in a bowl.
Are zoo lions happier than their "typical" cousins in the wild? Of course, it depends on the particular environmental conditions of the zoo lions and of those cousins in the wild at the particular moment in question, but on the whole, I would have to say "No." By caging the lion, or even placing it in a "natural" zoo habitat, you take away too much of its essential "lion-ness" (as opposed to lioness). To be a lion is to hunt and kill and steal meals from hyenas and vultures, and to lie about with a full stomach during most of the day in the shade on the hot plain. It is also to go hungry when the zebras and the wildebeests migrate away from your territory during the dry season. It is also to roam and defend one's territory, or to be a nomad and sometimes try to join a pride. It is not to languish about in a cage or a "natural" zoo habitat with little to do but await the next meal.
(This poses some interesting questions about domesticated animals, but that's for another thread.)
AS
