Nice info, but none of that disagrees with Jason's statement that, "No other life form we know about can come close to matching us in those two arenas."

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

There is lot of very smart cookies out there, but none of them have done what we have done, move out of our own ecosystem successfully. You'll find human beings living quite comfortably all over the world. Most other creatures that have done that seem to be hitchhikers that came with us. It isn't so much of a matter of us adapting per say, people don't grow fur in the arctic, as much as us creating technology to make every place just like home. That tarantula may keep a pet frog, but I don't see it weaving a blanket out of its silk for cold nights. That monkey may be good at getting yogurt out of tubes, but I don't see it making yogurt. The finch may be adept at getting bugs out, but I don''t see any efforts to farm the bugs. The vulture may fly 50 miles for the perfect rock, but I don't see any efforts to modify a closer rock to make it perfect.
In short humanity, through whatever through this combination of instincts, intelligence, language, and who knows what, cover the world.
And that is success.

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And some seemingly intelligent behavior is nothing more than happenstance symbiosis, or, for that matter, mere conditioning. Could be the spiders were going to eat the frog (frogs tasting like chicken), but after a few hours, they'd conditioned on the frog and the frog them. The spiders might be oblivious to the frog eating the ants, just as the frog might be oblivious to the spiders eating other things, but the frog is warm, has food nearby, and the spiders are ok with sharing their den with mostly passive rock next to them, so...

Intelligent? Or just convenient? I don't think it involves intelligence any more than a rattlesnack crawling into a gopher hole. Neither is food for the other, nor do they compete for food, so sharing a hole is probably little different than my not bothering a small spider in the corner. He does keep the moth population down. He doesn't bother me, I don't bother him.

Getting back to tool usage among animals...

Otters crack shells on rocks on their bellies;

Seagulls drop mullosks onto hard surfaces like rocks;

Bottlenose dolphins (in Shark Bay) use marine sponges as foraging tools; such use is passed via matrilinially between generations (they break a marine sponge off the seafloor and wears it over their closed rostrum, probing it into the substrate for fish).

Gorillas, chimpanzees, and most primates use primative tools.

Crows use foraging tools, inserting sticks into logs to extract termites.

In Japan, crows have developed a technique whereby they drop nuts into traffic, and during an appropriate lull in the traffic, they grab good stuff.

And perhaps one of the more amazing uses of tools: Elephants have been observed digging holes to drink water, then ripping bark from a tree, chewing it into the shape of a ball, then filling the hole and covering it with sand to avoid evaporation. They return later for regular refills.

I believe in so much as any of us among the animal kingdom are capable of using tools, whether we do so is largely a matter of whether it provides any significant value. Humans are by orders of magnitude above and beyond all other species when it comes to the complexity of the tools we can devise, yet I'll bet some humans might be hard-pressed to build a shelter as strong and as well insulated as that built by the weaver finch. Nor would many be likely to entrust their lives to it suspended meters above the ground!

When I was a child I built my share of tree forts in the woods, but I had enough good examples on which to draw some experience.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

Exactly, therein lies the difference! The weaver bird is doing this instinctively, as a way to attract a mate. You had a experience, you LEARNED this. Humans have instincts, watch any teenage male, but we learn, we create new things, and we pass the knowledge on. Language is what allows us to step outside our own heads and collectivize our efforts, not just for the present, but for the future as well. That way we don't have to redo all the mistakes of the past, we can improve.
Humanity, the Borg of the Animal Kingdom

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The bottom line is this, humans take raw materials whether they are mined, grown or harvested then create complex tools, machines, computers etc by understanding and learning the science behind it. Then we communicate this information on to future generations using written language. All this not only for survival but for ultimate exploration and understanding! we want to learn and know things not only just to survive but because we are conscious of our place and journey of evolution in the universe. There is no evidence of any other species past or present on earth, regardless how intelligent and capable of utilizing the surrounding environment they are that even come close! We are as yet unique!

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Its better to burn out! than to fade away....

We are not alone, but we may as well be!

"Why?"

This is what makes us unique amongst the species on this planet. We're the only one's who don't simply try to figure out how to do something, we also want to know why it happens.

I'm assuming you mean to say the frog is warm as in "warm and happy" (a roof over his head) rather than suggesting that the frog is actively warming the den?

Normally I would point out that at some point the gopher would become lunch for the snake, but in this case the snake has already eaten.

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None to speak of

Would that be a tortoise-gopher or a rodent-gopher?

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

Success indeed, and I am the happier for it!

I wonder if we could teach monkeys to make yogurt without eating all the ingredients first?

Acorn woodpeckers may "farm" grubs, but I don't know. I'll look around, and if nothing else I now know what experiment to conduct when the acorns fall come autumn!

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None to speak of

Intelligent birds are not advancing to the point of a technical civilization today because we have taken over the environment and are "in their way" so to speak. But if we left the scene; we would leave open a niche for the advancement of such a hypothetical evolving creature. There probably can be only one dominant technical civilization per planet; but there may be exceptions to this rule...

Why do the most vicious species seem to evolve mostly around the equator?

Tigers, pack spiders, killer bees, humans...

I thought most of the world's poisonous animals lived in Australia.

Watch out for the dropping bears!

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

That's a good point though, would that mean that two simultaneous intelligent species on a planet would be rather unlikely unless they evolved in total isolation from each other?
Think of the poor Neanderthals...

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

The day I see another animal create fire, or make something like a wheel, I'm running for the hills.

I'm not so sure. humans have evolved at a very fast rate, from tree climbing apes to bipedal upright walking technological advanced animals, in a very short time relative to the evolution of other species. If the modern bird turns out conclusively to be the descendent's of the dinosaurs, then have had a very long time to evolve into technological animals.

This is a good point, even 2 advance species living on neighboring planets may have difficulty in co-habiting the same solar system. (war of the worlds) We have difficulty co-habiting the same planet with each other and we are the same species! (how many wars? )

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Its better to burn out! than to fade away....

We are not alone, but we may as well be!

But having wars doesn't equate to not being able to evolve. After all, if another species was truly that intelligent, able to become what we have, us simply being here would not stop them. They would find a way around it.

And evolution proceeding equates to having fewer wars? It's that meme again...

Probably because it's highly valuable real-estate, natural niche speaking. The tropics specifically, the deserts less so. If you want to keep it, you have to have something nasty up your sleeve.

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http://amssolarempire.blogspot.com

It's bad enough when your enemy if of another ethnicity. If our enemies had been from another species, I fear it would have just been too easy to excuse their extermination as "pest control". Or for them to justify our extermination as pest control.

You would see legions of intellectuals in the dominant species rationalising it all away: "What, they?! They're not really intelligent. It's all reflex behaviour" "Oh, come on, they're animals! Why do you care more about animals than people?"

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

We also have to remember the time scales involved and what "quick" means on an evolutationary scale. Going from tree climbing apes to humans was quick, as mentioned earlier. But we're still talking a million years or more. Any signs of intelligence we see today we might have to wait a million years to see if there is any meaningful progress.

Maybe a mutant dolphin will be born with fingers at the end of its flippers, then we'll really start to see some things.

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.