why are preditors more intelegent?

haven't seen anyone mentioning that they don't have jaws...just that they don't have teeth...

 

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I think they have jaws, I found this on Yahoo search, It mentions an Ant Eater Jaws, though the rest of the info don't seem correct.

This was how ants died in his belly, in the thousands, squashed not by his narrow snout's feeble jaws but by the walls of his muscular gut.
He belched, long and high-pitched, and rolled onto his side, enjoying the swollen feeling. Instead of spending hours hunting for ants or termites, and having to rip open the hill and lick them up, his tongue had found this man's feet as he slept in the field. So quickly had be pulled it in that the meal had only awoken when up to his armpits in snout.
It'd screamed then, unsure what was happening, but before it had time to cry out again the swollen snout had pulsed and rippled, and the shoulders and face had been gone. Hands had clutched at the lips of his snout, and then a last, heavy gulp, and he'd settled down as he was now, enjoying the squirming inside.


hmm... naaa...

 

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anyhoo....

it is an anthropomorphic thing to do to measure the animal kingdom according to intelligence.

we know that we are intelligent...therefore it is an important quality. Many animals get by without being intelligent at al...the entire plant kingdom gets by without a single thought...ever...and yet we search for the qualities which resemble ours, not thinking about whether they are important in the big picture.

blabla

 

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I knew it!.... I knew this thread was leading up to something! so, we are intellegent hmmm? lets ponder a moment.. we seek to control all in sight, including each other, and that is a sad game we play, may the best man/woman loose, and the wiley, intellegent, predatory.. "we" in us, eats not only food for free at times, we scavenge each other in the name of good buisiness, we will lure away a spouse from a confused marraige, use them for advantage, maybe, maybe the game turns, and it hurts like hell.. but nobody wants to hear that, because the rules are plain.... yes.. of course we knew because we are ...Predators! or, we are investors in others losses, like a pawnshop we give little for a memento, a speacial commitment, a past Icon of happier days, and it is a Sale.... success! One prospers, the other fails and suffers, or do they? its easy to say... a fool and his money are soon parted, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! it was a good buy, but I jewed him down more, and got it cheaper... a Winner I am....? only the strong survive! it not my fault they are losers. I went to school! I EArned my way.. lordy,, the Neighbors must be having money problems, they fight and argue a lot! I bet I can get that old Family Heirloom they love so much,,, Real Cheap now! We are not Cannibals, we let our prey live, we do not eat Flesh,, we prefer the Heart and Soul. let them suffer in peace* I'd rather be an AntEater, with heartburn, and hehe...... No teeth!


*fAr OuT MaN... that felt ....Gooude*

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I'm almost done now.. What Else needs dicussing?

 

And The Answer Is . . .

My guess: coordination. The coordination of senses and muscles is slightly more important in an organism that pursues than in one that evades -- whereas fleeing prey can rely on number (scatter tactics) and almost ignore the environment (short of not running into things, off cliffs, etc.), a predator must take its prey, its environment, and its personal health into account, all the while performing acrobatic feats of movement coordinated by its big brain. It's a lot easier for random mutations to generate a BIG (or more complicated) brain than it is to create a brain that has been augmented in specifically convenient areas -- thus, intelligence would be a side-effect of a tool for body coordination.

As to the number/society issue, I think the first couple posts in this thread got it backwards: predators are often solitary (stealth advantage), whereas prey usually has no reason not to be social. I don't think pack mentality increases individual intelligence: rats, other mammals, some insects, etc. aren't considered intelligent but are considered social.

One similar alternative that I think WOULD work is that prey species are often R species (light investment, high number of offspring) and predators are often K species (heavy investment, small number of offspring).

But all of this is unnecessarily pan-Darwinian -- it's probably just a coincidence, and, as has been suggested, a problem with our perception of intelligence.

 

Well intelligence has two components - thinking fast and the ability to grasp the salient features of a problem given long times. I would imagine many animals don't ever need to grasp concepts in a creative manner to thrive. They have survival skills that have a straight-forward implementation and likely fairly hard wired. The calculation of where a prey is going to be in a second could still be blindingly fast and better than one could calculate.

Being able to really figure out better approaches to problems, especially when one can use tools or even with a set of built-ins like appendages, really changes things though. I think the creative type of problem solving is an interesting type of intelligence that is relevant to the evolution of general survival strategies, not super specialized ones, is very interesting and a relevant topic of debate. The evilness that humans can come up with aside (I'm sorry for your pain slim) I think that was at the heart of this discussion. And relevant to the big picture.

I've heard Elephants have good memories and stuff, but how intelligent are they compared to other groups? Has anyone done any type of general comparitive intelligence testing among mammals or vertebrates? I'd love to read something about that.

One can hand wave an explanation about anything complex especially with little information to go on. There's always some feature one can attribute a relationship to. It's like verbal over-fitting your data.

My guess under such a disclaimer would be that Elephants are not highly maneuverable and need to be aware and attentive to their environment to maintain their near invulnerability. In my personal experience data and attentiveness are the root of true intelligence. Uninformed smart people live in a highly rationalized world bearing less resemblance to reality than it should ... but such an explanation as well could be all rationalization bearing little resemblance to reality.

By the way, when I said "it's capacity to feed" I was really thinking more like thrive and reproduce. If predation is a major shaping force of a population I would imagine simple growth dynamics (ie maximal rate of simply producing more individuals) would be selected for strongly. Once again little data to back that up though.

LoaTzu - interesting ideas ... I think one does have to view the problem more mechanistically in things such as rates and costs of production to get to the heart of it.

 

Maybe?

It seems overly simplistic, but maybe the same forces that made it bigger made the brain bigger, more expansive/complicated, and thus more intelligent?

 

Re: And The Answer Is . . .

i'm sorry to inform you that rats are quite intelligent.

we were not talking about the fact that being social requires intelligence....because it doesn't...

BUT complex group dynamics requires intelligence...as can be seen for instance in a group of chimpansees, or a pack of wolves...people....

want you may wonder if what was there first....the egg or the chicken: was there intelligence before the social group and did this make intricate social behaviour possible...or did they both go hand in hand during evolution.


the real answer is:

there is no single answer...intelligence probably emerged for different reasons in different species.

 

I found an old thread!!

Yes rats are quite intelligent, i'm convinced that in some ways they are more intelligent than people.

Elephants have a rather unique story, they started evolving to be aquatic mammals when water was everywhere, but just as soon as they made those changes water started drying up.
Technically they should have gone extinct but the smarter individuals found ways to survive against all odds and this continued over quite some time.
Naturally now we have pretty smart elephants because strictly only the smartest survived.
Indeed, all the very intelligent animals(including humans) have descended from animals who were faced with overwhelming adversity where the only way around it was to use your head.
Only the smartest bears can store enough fat during the summer to survive hibernation. Only the smartest elephants can navigate through miles and miles of desert to find waterholes and food. Only the smartest raccoons can find food all year round in varying conditions.
All these animals are just getting smarter and smarter.

Cetaceans got their large brains by making the adaptation from land to water first and foremost, that is a huge adaptation to make that demanded much intelligence from the pioneers that originally survived the change.
Even in cases where this adaptation is quite simple, the brain needed to increase. Manatees have very basic lives and their move from land to water was the least demanding intellectually. All they do is eat sea grass. But they still got bulked up a little in the brains department from the change. Juts because its a vastly different environment.

Humans must have faced quite a few hard times in their history to get the brains they have. This also could explain why they are so instinctually bitter at the natural world

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It must have been tough break after tough break just barging in like the waves of the ocean.
We humans have obviously been tested greatly in our past, with only super genius's making it through some of the hard times.
But, we have well and truely stopped getting smarter now, unlike bears and elephants and raccoons.
This could lead to a revolution in the future, oh god I hope that happens. I can see it now.
Retarded dysgenic future humans walking into traps set up by genius grizzly's, super smart raccoons making people think their food is cursed which makes them keep giving it to the raccons untill the people starve, elephants with human slaves...
Sweet.

 

Asguard. You've only replied once to all of these posts. What do you think now?

Anteaters do have jaws but they are very small and nothing in comparison to other mammals. An anteater's head is long and tubelike, ending in a small narrow snout that sucks the insect out. Inside the anteater's head is a long tongue that protrudes from the oral opening measuring up to or even more than 2 feet long. This tongue is used to extract insects and is coated with a sticky saliva. Anteaters have no teeth but they use their small internal their jaws to chew.

I see no proof that predators are smarter than their prey. If that were the case than they would soon overwhelm their prey and have nothing left to eat, although there are cases in geological history where this has happened - and also in recent history! There are only about 50 mountain lions left in Florida but this is mostly due to human impact on their environment, but we have been eliminating their natural range and thus preventing them from hunting prey.

In general, and has been shown and proven through biological and genetic studies, the prey evolves a trait or technique (such as camouflage colors in butterflies) to elude the predator, and the predator then evolves a trait to help it get its prey (such as electric field sensory perception in sharks, or larger canines in lions and tigers).