Chicken and egg ?! WFL On 3/25/15, rkg <rkg@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
By flying with their parents ? R.
On Wed, 25 Mar 2015, Fred Lunnon wrote:
<< even partial skills won't be transferred to the next generation >>
An elegant argument which embarrassingly fails to conform to observation. For instance, how did migratory birds manage to acquire the same capability?
WFL
On 3/25/15, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
I heard a recent program on the ability of ancient Polynesians to navigate the Pacific Ocean w/o clocks/longitude or GPS.
Supposedly, the Polynesian navigators use information about waves/swells/etc. to detect the presence & direction of islands over the horizon.
I'm a bit skeptical about this, because unless these skills are relatively easily acquired, anyone with less than a certain critical mass of skills will die, and even partial skills won't be transferred to the next generation. (This is semi-analogous to the spread of a communicable disease, only in this case we _want_ the navigational information/techniques to propagate.)
On the other hand, if this information is available in the wave/swell patterns, then presumably an "AI" computer program could learn these techniques by sending out lots of little buoys with GPS, sky-facing camera (for sun & star info) & wave-sensing capabilities, and eventually learn how to correlate these wave/swell patterns with positions relative to known islands.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090917235953/http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/navigate...
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