On 20 March 2014 15:25, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> It means that birds squawk because they like the feeling and sound of it. > The intention of using the squawking to convey information is optional and > evolves much later. > As stated, that strikes me as unlikely, because simply squawking for the hell of it is liable to get you eaten, or to give away your location to your prey. So it carries a negative evolutionary "cost" (so to squawk) and seems unlikely to have evolved *just *because birds enjoy doing it. However, that having been said, it *also* seems very unlikely to me that squawking appeared because it was useful for communication. Because it wouldn't have been, to start with - noises can only convey information once someone else knows what they mean - and of course, evolution can't "look ahead" to see that something might come in useful in 100 generations time. It seems most likely to me that certain sounds just tend to accompany certain physical actions or emotional states (or both) as a by-product, and that for some of these noises there isn't any evolutionary pressure to keep them quiet (as there would be, say, to stop a bird of prey shrieking with joy when it sees a potential dinner scampering across the grass below). So most noises made by animals would start as "spandrels" - by-products of existence with no significance. Some noises would, in fact, have an evolutionary cost, and hence selection pressure would tend to suppress them. This has happened to cats, for example, for various movements accompanying hunting. Others might be useful for panicking prey or letting you locate other members of your species, even if they didn't convey any information except "I'm here!" And some would be evolutionarily neutral, so evolving a method of keeping them quiet would be more trouble than it was worth from the viewpoint of a selfish gene. But given that such noises existed, over time they might come to be recognised by other members of the same species as denoting certain things - hence members of the species "realised" they could get useful information from some noise their species made (or their genes did, at least). Once that happened, the information content of the noise would be able to co-evolve with the ability to detect and understand it, and once that process started, it could branch out into unexpected side-alleys - mating cries, warning cries, and even in our case a full-blown language. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
