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Old 03-08-2006, 06:06 AM   #2 (permalink)
nezmot
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My question is, who teaches this alligator to take care of the young of other species.
Nobody, it's an ingrained process - otherwise known as instinct, or intuition. Many people think behaviours like these have genetically defined precursors.

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The survival of the fittest would have told the alligator to eat the turtle.
No it wouldn't.

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Why should the alligator care for the young of other species?
For the same reasons that other animals tend to look after the young of other species. Namely a genetic propensity to look after things that are underage. Nature is an inexact and imperfect thing, and it's much easier to have a creature feel well disposed to things that have infant features (generally large head and limbs in proportion to the rest of the body) than it is for the creature to recognise creatures that are of the same species (species being an artificial human label applied to various forms of life, and as such, it is a concept completely alien to the alligator).

Come to think of it, does an alligator know it is an alligator? Or staying close to the point in hand, how does it know it's not a turtle? It would make sense for nature to define 'things worth looking after' in terms of general physical characteristics, because that's probably the simplest way of doing it. The upshot of that is that (apparently) strange things happen like alligators looking after turtles, rabbits bringing up fox cubs and ducks bringing up goats.

Analogously, the various optical illusions that our eyes fall prey to are artifacts of nature taking these 'shortcuts' or easy ways out of processing information - yet another proof that all things are not as 'perfect' as some people would imagine them to be.
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