Re: How to eat your lunch

["Jaime Headden" <jaemei@hotmail.com>]

I wrote:

<<Now, it doesn't require any great intelligence to do this...>>

Jeffrey Martz wrote:

<It doesn't?  Are you sure?>

And my reply:

  Pretty sure.

  Let me elucidate: lower intelligence animals at the level of cats and 
dogs are capable of cooperative behavior [as well as pack behavior] and 
so are birds [many parrots are capable of social gatherings in the 
hundreds, as I understand it] and of course we know about bands of 
passerines and hawks doing this, and even African fish eagles will 
cooperatively defend their territory. But we've gone through this.

  Mark this as "cooperative", meaning a social order that doesn't 
require human-level or wolf-level sociality, and exists in such things 
as [getting to basics] fish, though mammals and reptiles have taken a 
one-up on the order, and mammals a two-up to true pack-behavior, then 
primates to the family social order, where are members of the group 
remain members. There are various complexities, multiple qualifiers that 
_can_ be used as "cooperative" in animals, and cats, dogs, birds, and 
dinosaurs were all at the level [we can really never tell on the last 
one] of at least basal cooperation.

  And that's what this is all about, cooperation. Whether this 
cooperation would have led to a pack social order is actually 
untestable, unless on can find fossilized nests in a wolf-style den 
area, provable that a family of adults lived together, then we'd get 
closer. But we can test cooperation, so we have at least some probably 
proof of that.

Jaime A. Headden

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