Creationism in Crisis - Elephants Know One Another by Name - Just Like Humans

Researchers found that elephants have arbitrary vocal labels for each other, similar to human names.

Credit: George Wittemyer

Elephants have names for each other like people do, new study shows - Warner College of Natural Resources

It's an article of faith in creationist cults that humans are a special creation, materially different to other animals and the evidence for this is that we have unique characteristics, ignoring for the moment that every species has unique characteristics, which is what makes them distinct species. And the list of 'uniquely human' characteristics which by creationist circular logic is 'evidence' of human uniqueness, includes language, culture, intelligence, the ability to make and use tools, a sense of self-identity, compassion, empathy, and love and affection.

The problem is, the items on this list keep on being found to not be unique to humans after all, but to be characteristic of lots of other species.

Common Ancestry - How Young Chimps Learn To Use Tools - Just Like Human Children

Chimpanzee Zinda fishing for termites in Gombe National Park

Photo: Nick Riley

Wild western chimpanzee using a stick tool to extract high-nutrient food.

Credit: Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project (CC BY 4.0)

Protracted development of stick tool use skills extends into adulthood in wild western chimpanzees | PLOS Biology

Chimpanzees are famous for making and using tools, especially sticks, for obtaining nutritional foods like grubs and termites, but using them takes time, just like a human child needs to develop motor skills to use tools such as pens and pencils with sufficient dexterity.

How they do so, and the stages they go through, was described recently in an open access paper in PLOS Biology by a team of animal behaviourists from l'Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (The Marc Jeannerod Institute of Cognitive Sciences), Lyon, France; the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and the German Primate Center, Göttingen, Germany, who analyzed film of wild chimpanzees making and using stick tools in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire.

They concluded that, like human children, acquiring motor skills is not just a matter of practice, important though that it, but also depends on a protracted childhood during which they observe and copy adults with the necessary skills. In other words, young chimpanzees learn skill from their parents and elders, like a human apprentice.

The team's work was explained in information made available ahead of publication by PLOS, and published in SciTechDaily.com:

Why Religious People Find Atheism and Science Hard To Understand - Study Shows Atheists Are Generally More Intelligent Than Religious People

Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent? | Psychology Today

One of the frustrating things about trying to debate with religious people in the social media, especially fundamentalists and creationists, is that they seem to have difficulty understanding simple logic such as the idea that the only reason for belief is evidence or the fact that lots of people believe something doesn't affect the truth of the belief.

There is also the impression (actually, it’s more than an impression, it seems to be a characteristic) that they think ignored evidence can be disregarded, so they will never read an article showing their beliefs to be wrong.

They generally seem more easily fooled by, for example, believing that an internet source supports them, when it is almost a rule that a link to a science paper provided by a fundamentalist will always say the opposite to what they claim it says, or that the ridiculous parody of science they've been fed by a creationist disinformation site such as AnswersInGenesis.com that no sane person would believe, is actually what real scientists believe. They have simply swallowed a lie and didn't see any need to check.

So, why do so many fundamentalists come across as limited in their ability to assimilate information and use it as the basis for opinions, other than an arrogant assumption that their beliefs must be true because they believe them, so no evidence is required and any contradictory evidence can be dismissed out of hand as 'wrong' or 'lies' or part of a giant conspiracy, and why do so many creationists came across as having the thinking ability of a toddler with a teleological view of the universe where even elementary particles are sentient and need to be told how to behave and which rules they must obey?

A meta-analysis of 63 earlier studies showed a statistically significant negative correlation between IQ and religiosity.

Creationism in Crisis - Social Learning Is Part of Beaked Whale Culture - Just Like Humans

Baird's beaked whale is the largest of the beaked whales, reaching a length of up to 10 meters.

Surprising Behavior in One of the Least Studied Mammals in the World - SDU

Continuing where I left off with the account of how orcas (killer whales) form distinct cultures based on food, hunting strategies, location and dialect, which parallel human cultures in many way, we now have evidence that at least one of the 24 known species of the beaked whales, Baird's beaked whale, form cultural groups, and that another 'human' trait - social learning - is involved in the formation of these cultures.

Creationists, of course, continue to insist that only humans form cultures and have the social ethics that hold them together because they were specially created in a way that makes them materially different to all other animals, and by the circular reason that often typifies creationist arguments, this proves they were specially created by a god who holds them in the highest esteem.

s But as we are learning, almost all the traits creationists try to claim are uniquely human and therefore proof of our special creation, are turning out to be common to many other species, especially mammals, and so are evidence for common ancestry and evolution by descent with modification.

The little-known beaked whale, a relative of orcas and dolphins, has recently been observed changing its habitat and hunting strategy by a process of social learning. This is the same process by which growing children adopt the social norms and customs of their culture and how people from other cultures can assimilate into unfamiliar cultures. Essentially it means observing others and memorizing what they do in any given situation.

This observation was made by researchers from the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) led by Olga Filatova, a whale expert and postdoc at Department of Biology and SDU Climate Cluster. She led the study which showed that some pods of orcas in the Pacific have occupied the same area since the last Ice Age glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago when they occupied warmer refugia and adopted them as permanent territories. The same study showed how orcas form distinct 'ecotypes' which are genetically isolated from other ecotypes by cultural barriers to interbreeding.

For the beaked whale study, the team observed a population of Baird's beaked whales, which has unexpectedly been found near the coast and in shallower waters than previously observed.

Their work has been published, open access, in the journal Animal Behaviour and is explained in a SDU press release by Birgitte Svennevig:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Discover Flamingos Have Personalities Too

Creationism in Crisis

Scientists Discover Flamingos Have Personalities Too

The partner of one Caribbean flamingo helps it out in an argument with another pair

Caribbean flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber

Credit: Paul Rose

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Caribbean flamingos with chicks

© Claudio Contreras Koob/naturepl.com

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Nesting flamingos

© Claudio Contreras Koob/naturepl.com

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Flamingos bathing

© Claudio Contreras Koob/naturepl.com

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Flamingos bathing

Klaus Nigg, National Geographic Image Colection

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Flamingo chick

© Claudio Contreras Koob/naturepl.com

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Chick being fed

© Claudio Contreras Koob/naturepl.com

Flamingos form cliques with like-minded pals - News

According to Creationist superstition, humans are specially created as a different form of life from the rest of creation and so are the only species capable of experiencing 'higher' emotions such as love and friendship, or of being able to empathise with other members of the same species. This superstition is vigorously maintained, probably because the cult leaders understand that it makes their dupes feel special enough, so they stick with the cult and reject any idea which seems to reduce their over-inflated sense of self-importance.

The superstition is maintained despite the growing number of examples of other species having these 'human' emotions, such as this example of flamingos forming friendship and mutual support groups depending on their personality. Flamingos with similar personalities prefer to associate together and will even defend one another if attacked by a member of another group.

Flamingos are highly gregarious and can be seen in groups ranging from a half dozen to many thousands. I have seen small flocks of maybe a dozen in Andalucia, Spain and in Kuwait, larger flocks of several thousand in the Camargue, France and probably tens of thousands on the Limasol Salt Lake, Akrotiri, Cyprus.

The research in question was carried out on a captive population of Caribbean flamingos at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, UK, by two scientists from Exeter University.

The research is explained in an Exeter University news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Research Shows That Cleaner Wrasse Have a Sense of Self

Creationism in Crisis

Research Shows That Cleaner Wrasse Have a Sense of Self

“It’s me!” fish recognizes itself in photographs | Osaka Metropolitan University

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Bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus

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Bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus

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Bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus

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Bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus

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Bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus

Another nail has been driven into the coffin of the absurd Creationist notion that humans are a unique creation of a magic creator who endowed us with special qualities not given to other species. One of these supposed unique species is sentience, which includes a sense of self, so only humans are supposedly able to understand that they have some special purpose, while all other life-forms are unaware of, for example, their own existence and mortality.

And of course, not being sentient they are not capable of having emotions and run entirely on instinct and reflexes.

The nail was driven in quite casually and without the intention of refuting creationism, like so much else in science, simply by exposing the facts. The facts are once again diametrically opposite to what Creationists believe. The research team showed that a species of fish known as the bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus, has a sense of self to the extent that it recognises photographs of itself by recognising its own face.

Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that, when the photograph was 'shopped' to make it look there was a parasite attached to their throat, the wrasses rubbed themselves to try to remove it! This shows a remarkable degree of self-awareness and sentience, especially since mirrors are not part of their natural environment.

The team that made this discovery was led by Professor Masanori Kohda from the Graduate School of Science at the Osaka Metropolitan University. They showed that cleaner wrasses recognise themselves in photographs the same way humans do - by recognising their own face. These fish were chosen as research subjects because they appear to recognise strangers in their midst and drive them away, while tolerating others of their own companion group. In this way individuals maintain and defend their 'cleaning stations' where other fish come to be cleaned of parasites, even from inside the mouth of predatory fish.

The research is described in the Osaka Metropolitan University press release:

A big step forward in vertebrate cognitive function research

A research team led by Specially Appointed Professor Masanori Kohda from the Graduate School of Science at the Osaka Metropolitan University has demonstrated that fish think “it’s me” when they see themselves in a picture, for the first time in animals. The researchers found that the determining factor was not seeing their own body but seeing their face. These findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This study is the first to demonstrate that fish have an internal sense of self. Since the target animal is a fish, this finding suggests that nearly all social vertebrates also have this higher sense of self.

Professor Masanori Kohda, lead author
Laboratory of Animal Sociology
Department of Biology and Geosciences
Graduate School of Science
Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan

In this study, relevant experiments were conducted with Labroides dimidiatus, commonly known as a cleaner fish, which are known to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors and regularly attack other unfamiliar cleaner fish who intrude on their territory. Each cleaner fish was presented with four photographs: a photo of themselves; a photo of an unfamiliar cleaner; a photo of their own face on an unfamiliar cleaner’s body; and a photo of unfamiliar cleaner’s face on their own body. Interestingly, the cleaner fish did not attack photos with their own faces but did attack those with the faces of unfamiliar cleaner fish. Together these results indicate that the cleaner fish determined who was in the photograph based on the face in the photo but not the body in the similar way humans do.

To negate the possibility that the fish considered photographs of themselves as very close companions, a photograph mark-test was conducted. Fish were presented with a photograph where a parasite-like mark was placed on their throat. Six of the eight individuals that saw the photograph of themselves with a parasite mark were observed to rub their throats to clean it off. While showing those same fish pictures of themselves without parasite marks or of a familiar cleaner fish with parasite marks did not cause them to rub their throats.

The research and its significance are explained in the team's open access paper in PNAS:

Significance

Some animals have the capacity for mirror self-recognition, but implications for self-awareness remain controversial. Here, we show that cleaner fish, Labroides dimidiatus, likely recognize their own mirror image using a mental image of the self-face comparable to humans. Mirror-naïve fish frequently attacked photographs of both themselves and strangers. In contrast, after passing the mirror test, aggression against their own photograph and composite photographs of own face/stranger body declined, but aggression remained toward unfamiliar and composite photographs of stranger face/own body. Our results suggest that cleaner fish with MSR ability can recognize their own mirror image based on a mental image of their own face, rather than by comparing body movements in the mirror. This study demonstrates how animals recognize self-images.

Abstract

Some animals have the remarkable capacity for mirror self-recognition (MSR), yet any implications for self-awareness remain uncertain and controversial. This is largely because explicit tests of the two potential mechanisms underlying MSR are still lacking: mental image of the self and kinesthetic visual matching. Here, we test the hypothesis that MSR ability in cleaner fish, Labroides dimidiatus, is associated with a mental image of the self, in particular the self-face, like in humans. Mirror-naive fish initially attacked photograph models of both themselves and unfamiliar strangers. In contrast, after all fish had passed the mirror mark test, fish did not attack their own (motionless) images, but still frequently attacked those of unfamiliar individuals. When fish were exposed to composite photographs, the self-face/unfamiliar body were not attacked, but photographs of unfamiliar face/self-body were attacked, demonstrating that cleaner fish with MSR capacity recognize their own facial characteristics in photographs. Additionally, when presented with self-photographs with a mark placed on the throat, unmarked mirror-experienced cleaner fish demonstrated throat-scraping behaviors. When combined, our results provide clear evidence that cleaner fish recognize themselves in photographs and that the likely mechanism for MSR is associated with a mental image of the self-face, not a kinesthetic visual-matching model. Humans are also capable of having a mental image of the self-face, which is considered an example of private self-awareness. We demonstrate that combining mirror test experiments with photographs has enormous potential to further our understanding of the evolution of cognitive processes and private self-awareness across nonhuman animals.

Kohda, Masanori; Bshary, Redouan; Kubo, Naoki; Awata, Satoshi; Sowersby, Will; Kawasaka, Kento; Kobayashi, Taiga; Sogawa, Shumpei
Cleaner fish recognize self in a mirror via self-face recognition like humans
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; 2023, 120(7), e2208420120. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2208420120

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by PNAS. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It's worth repeating what Professor Kohda said: because this ability is present in a fish, it is likely to be present in all social vertebrates - a far cry from what Creationist frauds tell their credulous dupes to make them feel special.

Religion Is Not Natural

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

The Camino de Santiago de Compostela

source: Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Why do we believe in gods? Religious belief not linked to intuition or rational thinking, new research suggests

Are people born with the propensity to be religious, as some studies seem to have shown?

It is even claimed in some religious apologetic circles that somehow being religious is the natural state, either an evolved genetic predisposition, or, in fundamentalist creationist apologetics, that God intelligently designed us to be religious (obviously it couldn't have evolved, that would be heretical!).

Strangely, this god intelligently designed us to be religious but couldn't make us all have the 'one true religion'.

Of course, the bottom line is that somehow, atheism is unnatural, even perverse and definitely not something God intended.

The basis for that view of the origin of religiosity is based on the idea that religious belief is based on intuition rather than rational, analytical thinking (the Intuitive Belief Hypothesis). Certainly, arguments for creationism are invariable intuitive or more accurately, incredulitive, "I don't understand it, or can't believe it, therefore God!"

Now a new study by academics from Coventry and Oxford universities casts considerable doubt on this view and suggests that intuitive vs analytical thinking actually don't have much bearing on religious belief.

Anti-Atheists Tend To Have Low IQ!

Psychologists find correlation between low IQ and anti-Atheist prejudice.

Answering Unresolved Questions About the Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice.

Americans who are prejudiced against Atheists tend to have a lower than average IQ, according to research published in the Journal of Social Psychology and Personal Science a couple of weeks ago.

The research was conducted on a representative sample of 5,914 Americans by Mark J. Brandt, Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherland and Jarret T. Crawford of The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA. The paper sits behind a paywall but according to a press release by the Society for Personal and Social Psychology:

Crows Intelligently Refute Genesis

Tool bending in New Caledonian crows | Open Science

More evidence today that humans are not the only species with the intelligence and cognitive abilities to make and use tools.

We now know that several other species have the cognitive ability to make tools and at least one, the Caledonian Crow, goes one step further and not only makes simple modifications like stripping leaves from a twig but actually shapes the tool precisely, designing a tool fit for purpose.

We have known since 2002 that captive Caledonian crows such as the famous 'Betty' will bend wire into a hook to retrieve food. Wire is of course not a natural substance yet these crows appear to understand not only the shape and dimensions of the hook they need, but they also understand the tensile and maleability qualities of the wire they use. Because they were captive crows however it was always a possibility that there had been an element of training involved, even inadvertently.

Even Crows Can Put Two And Two Together

Crows are smarter than you think | Iowa Now

One of the major difficulties creationists seem to suffer from, at least in the way they deny evidence and logical argument, is a seeming inability to do basic joined up thinking. I appreciate that many creationist merely feign this inability in the same way they feign ignorance and even difficulty with basic comprehension when presented with unarguable facts.

For example, lead a creationist carefully through the three steps needed for evolution to be inevitable and you can get them to agree every single stage - inheritance of traits, imperfect replication of those traits giving variation and an environment which ensure more of some variations and less of others get to reproduce - and they will feign an inability to join those dots to see that this gives more of some variations in the next generation and fewer of others. And even if they admit that last conclusion, they'll still declare evolution to be impossible and declare it doesn't happen.

Atheism Increasing In Line With Intelligence

Brain drain: Are we evolving stupidity? - life - 20 August 2014 - New Scientist

An article by Bob Holmes in New Scientist this week reports that there appears to be a slight reversal in recent years of a trend in IQ scores which had been almost invariably upwards since records began to be collected in the 1950s.

The primary data comes from a standard IQ test given to 18 year-old Danish males as part of their conscription into military service. With the exception of a brief downward trend in the late 1970s, the reported IQ scores increased sharply until about 1995, then plateaued and now appear to have gone into reverse.

This sharply upward trend has been seen in every country where living standards and nutrition have improved, as they did in most of post-war Europe from the 1950s onwards. This change is known as the

Intelligent Design - Even Intelligent Pigeons Refute It

Bird brainiacs: The genius of pigeons - life - 04 May 2014 - New Scientist

More evidence emerged earlier this month that humans are far from unique in certain attributes that creationists like to present as uniquely human, God-given attributes such as intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness and inductive reasoning ability. Not only do we know that several apes and monkeys have these abilities but now feral pigeon, Columba livia, can be added to the list.

Feral or town pigeons are the descendants of pigeons which were first domesticated by Man about 5000 years ago from wild rock doves, which tend to inhabit rocky areas. The wild rock dove is now quite rare in many parts of its range. In the UK it is now restricted to north and West Scotland, some offshore islands and the coast of Northern Ireland. I have only ever seen two pairs; one in Oman, almost certainly the C. l. palaestinae subspecies, and one in the Tunisian Atlas Mountains. The feral form has adapted to living alongside humans for which it needed to be both flexible and opportunistic, both implying intelligence and the ability to learn. Similar attributes can be seen in rats, dogs and cats, for example. The variations in colour and markings to be seen in the feral form are almost certainly the result of human selective breeding.

Of course, ever since the famous psychologist B.F.Skinner showed with his operant conditioning experiments, we have known that pigeons will develop religion when 'rewards' become dissociated from actions. Like religious humans, operantly conditioned pigeons perform rituals apparently in the belief that they influence the outcome of what is actually a randomised and unpredictable system, just as humans sing, say prayers and adopt ritual body postures thinking they are influencing the future.

Now it seems that this is due to a limited form of simple reasoning ability which probably includes both self-awareness and the ability to 'philosophise', i.e to think about thinking and to be aware of their own knowledge - I'm talking about pigeons here, not religious humans, by the way.

For example, Mike Columbo of Otago University, New Zealand, has shown the pigeons can memorise more than 100 images and recall them more than two years later. He also showed that they can handle numbers and subtle relationships between them. For example, pigeons trained to peck at a series of images of ascending numbers of object, when given a series of images with larger numbers of objects up to nine, still pecked them in ascending order.

They can also apply deductive reasoning logic such as working out that if person B is taller than person A and person C is taller than person B then person C is taller than person A. They can do this with up to five people. This was a logic puzzle upon which Aristotle mused.

Some researchers have also shown that they can recognise the style of different artists and distinguish a Monet from a Picasso. They can also distinguish between major styles of art such as cubism and impressionism.

In another experiment, pigeons were fed by two very similar people in terms of skin and hair colour, height and age but wearing different coloured coats. One person simply fed them whilst the other chased them. The pigeons quickly learned to tell the 'hostile' person from the neutral one. They even recognised the right person when they swapped coats.

Abstract
Considered as plague in many cities, pigeons in urban areas live close to human activities and exploit this proximity to find food which is often directly delivered by people. In this study, we explored the capacity of feral pigeons to take advantage of this human-based food resource and discriminate between friendly and hostile people. Our study was conducted in an urban park. Pigeons were fed by two experimenters of approximately the same age and skin colour but wearing coats of different colours. During the training sessions, the two human feeders displayed different attitudes: one of the feeders was neutral and the second was hostile and chased away the pigeons. During the two test phases subsequent to the training phase, both feeders became neutral. Two experiments were conducted, one with one male and one female feeder and the second with two female feeders. In both experiments, the pigeons learned to quickly (six to nine sessions) discriminate between the feeders and maintained this discrimination during the test phases. The pigeons avoided the hostile feeder even when the two feeders exchanged their coats, suggesting that they used stable individual characteristics to differentiate between the experimenter feeders. Thus, pigeons are able to learn quickly from their interactions with human feeders and use this knowledge to maximize the profitability of the urban environment. This study provides the first experimental evidence in feral pigeons for this level of human discrimination.
© Springer-Verlag 2011

Belguermi A, Bovet D, Pascal A, Prévot-Julliard AC, Saint Jalme M, Rat-Fischer L, Leboucher G.;
Pigeons discriminate between human feeders.;
Anim Cogn. 2011 Nov;14(6):909-14. doi: 10.1007/s10071-011-0420-7. Epub 2011 Jun 7.

Other experiments have shown that pigeons can plan ahead, are aware of their own knowledge, and can recognise themselves in a video.

Abstract
The ability to recognize self has been known to be limited to some animal species, but previous research has focused almost exclusively on the animal's reaction to a mirror. Recent studies suggest that the temporal contingency between a subject's action and the corresponding visual scene reflected in a mirror plays an important role in self-recognition. To assess the roles of visual-proprioceptive contiguity in self-recognition, we explored whether pigeons are able to discriminate videos of themselves with various temporal properties. We trained five pigeons to respond to live video images of themselves (live self-movies) and not to video filmed during previous training sessions (pre-recorded self-movies). Pigeons learned to peck trial-unique live self-movies more frequently than pre-recorded self-movies. We conducted two generalization tests after pigeons learned to discriminate between the two conditions. First, discrimination acquired during training sessions was transferred to a test session involving live self-movies and new pre-recorded self-movies. Second, the same pigeons were tested in extinction procedure using delayed live self-movies and new pre-recorded self-movies. Although pigeons responded to delayed presentations of live self-movies more frequently than to new pre-recorded self-movies, the relative response rate to delayed presentation of live self-movies gradually decreased as the temporal discrepancy between pigeons' own behavior and the corresponding video increased. These results indicate that pigeons' discrimination of self-movies with various temporal properties was based on the temporal contiguity between their behavior and its visual feedback. The methodology used in the present experiment is an important step toward improving the experimental analysis of self-recognition in non-human animals.

Toda K, Watanabe S.;
Discrimination of moving video images of self by pigeons (Columba livia);
Anim Cogn. 2008 Oct;11(4):699-705. doi: 10.1007/s10071-008-0161-4. Epub 2008 Jun 3.

The interesting thing is that bird intelligence, which has also been demonstrated in the crow and parrot families, seems to have evolved independently from mammalian intelligence and involves different parts of the brain, although the neurons involved seem to be very similar, as though there is only the one solution to the 'problem' of evolving intelligence at the cell level. Nevertheless, and to further embarrass the proponents of the intelligent design hoax, nature appears to have 'invented the wheel' at least twice so far as evolving intelligence is concerned.

It would be interesting to see how cephalopods (octopuses and squids) fare in intelligence tests and how that has evolved, because, with their known to be intelligent behaviour and ability to plan and their very different nervous systems, one thing we can be sure about is that nature has invented the wheel yet again with these molluscs.

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Thinking Intuitively

Bat + ball cost $110; Bat costs $100 more than the ball

How much does the ball cost?

A recent piece of research published in Science suggested a correlation between analytical thinking and disbelief in religion. This article on boingboing.net illustrated the difference between the alanytical and intuitive thinking with a neat example:

Q: If a baseball and bat cost $110, and the bat costs $100 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

If you answered $10 you are inclined to believe in religion. If you answered $5 you are inclined to disbelieve.

To be honest, I answered $10, and for several minutes couldn't see what was wrong with that answer until I read the comments - which is rather worrying because I think of myself as an analytical thinker and earn my living at it - and yet, when I knew the right answer, I found it hard to understand why I found it hard to understand, if you follow me.

I've written a few times about how intuition is a poor measure of reality (see Xeno's Religious Paradox). This is particularly true in the realms of quantum mechanics and cosmology where the very small and the very large just seem to be counter-intuitive and yet the analytical tools of observation and mathematics tell us the counter-intuitive answer is actually the right one. A particle is also a wave and can be in several places at the same time; the universe is finite yet unbounded and everything really is nothing.

How does this translate to religious belief versus disbelief?

Unintelligent Design - Forming Alliances

The following is based on a post on Compuserve Science & Maths Forum in about 1995 by the late Marijke Van Ganz.  I paraphrase from memory and have certainly not done justice to Marijke whose succinct and poetic use of language enthralled those privileged to read her contributions to on-line debates.

Getting Milk.

Who says humans are the most intelligent species?

Down in the valley the Homo sapiens are busy capturing wild cattle, rounding them up into herds, taming them, erecting stout fences, building the milking parlours, making buckets and earthenware pots to collect and keep the milk....

Meanwhile, Felis catus rouses herself under the tree on the hill where she had been dozing in the warm sunshine, stretches, yawns, surveys her estate then wanders over to see how the work is progressing, says "Meow!" and gets milk.

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Natural selection ensures the most utilitarian method works.  Maybe we humans are fortunate our genes didn't form the same alliance with those of another species the way domestic cat genes did with ours.

Or are we?  Have we been tamed by cats?