martes, 17 de marzo de 2009

Lying Animals

"But do animals ever communicate false information; do they ever tell lies?"
According to Dawkins, they do. He talks about camouflage and some instincts being lies. Maybe the difference between animals and humans is that animals are not conscious of what they are doing. A bird might make a false alarm warning others of hawks and gets to be able to get more food for himself and he does it as a survival technique. Some plain old fly has the bees stripes in able to appear like a bee and avoid as many predators. Angel fish wait quietly at the bottom of the ocean camouflaging with the sand until a possible prey is close enough to get eaten. All of these animals are lying to survive. If the angle fish didn't hide, he'd never get other fish close enough to get them and eat them, he would starve. All of the animals lie, but not with evil intentions, just with selfish intentions. It is very different since one case infers the prosper of one with the destruction of the other while the other just wants the destruction of one and sees as a side effect the survival and prosperity of the other. We as humans instead are aware of our lies. We are aware of our intentions and we are aware of our motives. As humans, we choose when to lie and when to tell the truth, when to hide and when to come forth. We do things for our benefit or we do them for the disgrace it will bring the other. We are conscious of our acts and of their consequences. so why are humans so mean? how can be so selfish but then go and value altruism? why are we such hypocrites, even with ourselves? will we survive individually or will we survive due to group work? will we survive at all? Will we end up destroying one anther? how does our difference from all the other creatures affect our future? What is our purpose in life? Into what will we evolve? How much longer will we keep this form? Some questions just don't have answers and there is no way of getting them until they have actually occurred, there are some that will simply never have answers, or will develop more questions from each answer, we just don't know.

1 comentario:

Unknown dijo...

Lying is a form of deceit. However, disguising, forging or hiding is not the same as lying. Merely other forms of deceit. And in the case of the fly that looks like the bee I would not even call that deceit, as the fly can not choose to look like any other flies due to genetics.