Quote:

... and in all this bantering I see that no one is really answering my questions. One member did by speaking of the octopus' intelligence, but that does not explain things from an evolutionary perspective. That only leaves us with the age-old question of, "Where did its intelligence come from?" The other questions were basically left alone.



Sorry, Dan, my answers were way too short. One reason for this is that quite complicating theory of self-referential systems which is IMO quite important.
Okey, but there are other points that could be explained easier.

#1 The evolution of a species doesn't happen isolated. Their environment doesn't 'stand still'while the species are changing. The environment consists not only of geologic and climatic circumstances. That means anything in evolution develops itself within a companionship with other species, wether animals, plants, or bacterias. They develop in 'co-evolution' within an 'ecotop'.

#2 The evolution is seldom a prozess of perfectionizing or a prozess which is 'aiming' at completeness. The 'popular' sentence "surving of the fittest" is not correct. And there are evolutionists who accuse Darwin that he only stressed this sentence, because it rectified the colonization politics of the european nations at that time.
The main sentence IMO is that evolution happen within mainly two mechanism: variation and selection.
I say that evolution is seldom a prozess of perfectionizing or a prozess which is 'aiming' at completeness, that means it produces an overplus of features that are not necessary for surviving, but comes in with the development of needed abilities. Maybe, with a further change in the environment this unneeded can come in handy and give an advantage to survive. This means in addition that the known creatures are not the only possible species but that one which 'happened' to appear and got there niche in the ecotop to exist for while.


About connection of instinct and evolution in short: in the DNA is saved how a body is build up, this means it contains the information about how the nerves, neurons and "hardcoded" behaviours are build up, as well. This is part of the neurobiology whereof I don't know much.


I hope that this explains at least a bit of your questions. Tell me were you see a gap which needs further explanation.

http://www.puppenheim.org/
http://www.wuerfels-welt.de
Old Game Tutorial: http://www.puppenheim.org/MITutorial.zip
Free Game Editor: http://puppenheim.org/AlienalsWeihnachtsmann.zip
http://www.puppenheim.org/blender_starting_main_settings.txt