Can you imagine if there was a sea creature that would one day evolve the intelligence to surpass man but live in the ocean? Isn't that theoretically possible? a sea city.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Actually fish have evolved, bu very, very little. Very primative fish had no scales, only skin. They slowly evolved to the point that their at today. They have next to no intelligence because their enviroment, unlike ours, doesn't provide the right challenges. Where would a fish need to develop tools to survive in the ocean? Evolution happens by having a challenge presented to you, only to overcome it by either a biological or mental change triggered by the challenge. For example, recently born humans ( In the last 30 years or so) have adapted to higher C02 levels. There is a big difference between 1940's LA's and modern LA's C02 levels. People living in LA today have developed a tolerance for it. But too much change to quickly can still overwhelm the creature.
They certainly do flinch when you hurt or startle them. You're right that they don't run away when then are on a lab bench, but they do move away from pain when in water. http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/reprint/199/2/180.pdf No crying out, though, that's true. Not even sound-producing fish make sound in response to pain/negative stimuli.
That was basically my rhetorical question. What would motivate people to give up meat? Why don't you ask some vegetarians, I'm sure like all of us you know several. For many of them it's sheer woo-woo. They are convinced that meat, even in modest amounts, is actually bad for us, despite six million years of evolution equipping us, alone among all primates, with dentition, digestion and predation custom-adapted for it. But for others it really is a matter of morality. If you ask them why they don't eat meat they say it's because they don't believe in killing animals with the level of intelligence and emotions that most of our meat sources have. They may not be militants who picket us at butcher shops, but it turns their stomach to see the flesh of a pig--an animal not really much different from a dog in many important ways--on their dinner plate. They may even use reason to draw a line, and decide it's sort of okay to eat fish with their limited cognitive abilities, and definitely okay to eat clams and snails. The animal rights movement is growing in the industrial world. As civilization advances, one of the luxuries people adopt is companion animals. Meat is a fairly inefficient food product to produce and therefore increasingly expensive. We're already overfishing the seas. We keep getting better at devising food without meat protein that doesn't turn the stomach of an unrepentant carnivore--although it hasn't happened yet for me. All of these forces will certainly motivate a larger portion of humanity to give up meat. The question is will it ever be 100%, and like almost every other human activity the answer is surely no. It would almost surely have to be a mammal or a bird. Cold-blooded vertebrates, especially gill-breathers, just don't take in enough oxygen to sustain a large brain. There's a fundamental conflict between aquatic life and the building of civilization: the former selects for fins (seals and penguins) or only two nearly vestigial fins (whales), whereas the latter requires prehensile appendages like fingers. We regard the use of tools as a key step in the development of intelligence, and it's a required step in the development of civilization. The most intelligent marine mammals lost their fingers tens of millions of years ago, when that clan of hippopotamuses swam down to the mouth of the river and decided to keep going because the food was so great out there.
So then the question moves on. Do fish poses enough conscious awareness to "feel" pain, or do they simply react to it unconsciously as negative stimuli? Is there a difference?
Humans "feel" pain; there is no evidence as far as I'm aware that any other organism does not similarly "feel" pain, so the default inference is that they do so.
well they feel pain but don't necessarily have consciousness and that means its yum-yum time. Fishies taste awsome.
Do your equations have internal messaging systems or immune systems? Are they considered living by the common 7 rules of life?
I think the fish feels some pain, but not much. I think they suffer more from stress when caught then from pain.
