Bird Watching

I was in a park other day. Because I had nothing better to do at home. A father and his little daughter were watching a pigeon building its nest. The father started explaining pigeon's nest building tactics to his daughter. I couldn't help overhearing their conversation and this is sort of what he was telling -Pigeons learn nest building from older pigeons and design their nests based on their own whims and fancies.

But he was wrong. Pigeons, like all other animals and birds, are not capable of acquiring new skills or designing things on their own. Daniel C. Dennett defines mental abstraction in three levels; physical stance, design stance and intentional stance. Physical stance is being cognizant of physical qualities of things around us. When you sense an object and take notice of its shape, size, speed or momentum, you are taking physical stance at that object. Design stance is thinking in terms of purpose and function of physical objects. If you want to throw that object into a bin, you will take design stance and think in terms of applying right force, propelling in right direction, defining a purpose for your action and other similar considerations. Intentional stance is the level of awareness at which you think about other's perceptions and intentions. If you want to throw that object at your boss's head, you will be taking intentional stance and start thinking in terms of what he will think about you and your behavior. Intentional stance can be taken only on top of design and physical stances. Before considering the pros and cons of throwing something at your boss, you would have taken the physical and design stances.

My point is, animals and birds cannot take design or intentional stance. They can only take physical stance and can only react through involuntary instincts. If an antelope takes physical stance at a lion, it will run away because instincts will dictate the antelope to do so. It can neither choose to stay at the sight of lion and end it's life nor consider alternatives for next day's grazing and find a pasture devoid of lions. Any living being incapable of taking design stance will also be incapable of acquiring new skills. But, if animals and birds cannot take design stance, how do spiders build their web, beavers build their dams and pigeons build their nests? Well, in the same way as women make babies. A woman can single handedly (of course, with a little help from a man) create a baby without knowing how the twenty different amino acids are arranged in a hemoglobin molecule. We do not hear our moms saying, "Oh, I wasn't sure how to keep that hippocampus in the medial temporal lobe". Because, 'baby making' is governed by the unconscious part of women's nervous system that instructs other systems in their body to act in a coordinated fashion. The accidental consequence of such coordinated pattern is a human baby. Similarly the nervous system of a pigeon grows in such a way that the limbs and jaws of the living pigeon move in a coordinated pattern to build the nest. Per Dawkins, the pigeon very probably does not know what it is doing, nor why it is doing it. It's muscles and jaws just move in the way its nerves dictate, and nest is the result.