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Comment by sudofail | Hacker News Reader

Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival, it's not really surprising that ancestors of Homo Sapiens did as well.

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I find it completely unsurprising. Many animal species construct shelters/nests using available materials such as sticks, leaves, mud, etc. Humans are smart, so they do it more creatively, but no doubt our less-intelligent ancestors constructed shelters of some sort.

> Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival

It's more like they have a compulsion to stack wood where they hear running water. The implication here is intention and a cognizance of purpose, which is not unheard of in the animal kingdom but is fairly rare.

We don’t know that it’s purely compulsion, do we? Perhaps they know that still pools of water are best for survival so they’re motivated to prevent water from running away. The level of compulsion could be more sophisticated than we imagine. This seems to be true with many mammals. Not long ago in North America, it wasn’t uncommon to think of dogs as meat-headed automatons. Today it’s common to recognize that they have emotions and personalities much like we do, and there’s little evidence to suggest otherwise. I’m not convinced beavers are like giant fruit flies trying to plug holes.

Beavers lack the social mechanisms to transmit knowledge across time and space.

So either they are all independently inventing exactly the same solution to the problem... or it's some sort of instinctual compulsion.

We have similar compulsions too. Humans have an instinct to seek shelter, for example. You might say "well thats because we are taught this etc etc" but at the same time, all great apes shelter, our hominid ancestors sheltered, we shelter today, there is clearly an instinct to shelter even if we have these conscious thoughts around it. I bet if you had a perfectly feral human and had them in a clearing in a rain storm, they would try and find some shelter from it in the forest without being taught any wilderness survival basics.

Of course this is true.

But if you put a feral human in the middle of a clearing in a rainstorm, they wouldn't build modern civilisation.

Beavers only do what is innate and what they can independently invent in one lifetime, because they aren't substantially sharing knowledge.

This is the reasoning model for modern empiricists:

1. Make a baseless a-priori claim that mistakes what we have evidence of to be the bounded set of what is: 'We have not discovered any social mechanisms in beavers to transmit knowledge across time and space' is transfigurated into 'No social mechanisms exist in beavers to transmit knowledge'

Similarly, having not yet discovered a single reason for my wife to be upset with me, I must recognize that she doesn't have any.

2. Invent a false dichotomy, with one option being totally absurd, the other being your pet theory.

3. Settle on your preconceived notion.

Is it ever possible to transmit knowledge, or anything for that matter not across time and space?

Maybe this one of many half a million year old wooden beaver structures, given that they build in water.

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