THAT WHICH YOU CONSTANTLY ANALOGIZE TO YOU BELIEVE IN (via Brian Boys):

Fish Capable of Human-like Logic (Robin Lloyd, 1/24/07, LiveScience)

Fish have the reasoning capacity of a 4- or 5-year-old child when it comes to figuring out who among their peers is "top dog," new research shows.

Stanford University scientists made the discovery--said to be the first demonstration that fish can use logical reasoning to figure out their social pecking order--by studying fights among small, highly territorial, spiny-finned fish called cichlids, common in freshwater in tropical Africa, including in Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.

Logan Grosenick, a graduate student in statistics, and his colleagues found that a sixth fish could infer or learn indirectly which were the 1st through 5th strongest simply by observing fights among them in adjacent, transparent tanks, rather than by directly fighting each fish itself or seeing each fish fight all four others.

This type of reasoning, called transitive inference (TI), is a developmental milestone for human children, showing up nonverbally as early as ages 4 and 5; it also has been reported in monkeys, rats and birds. It allows thinkers to reason that if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A is also bigger than C.

Anthropomorphizing animals, or casting human intentions on them, is a mistake, Grosenick said...

Thereby indicting not just himself but the rapidly shrinking Richard Dawkins as well, who hilariously wrote:

Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior.

If it weren't for their constant invocation of intelligent design they'd have no theory at all.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2007 2:30 PM