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Just to add a little "fuel to the fire": if you separate a Robin's egg from its nest, hatch it in an incubater and never allow it to experience growing up in a Robin's nest of its very own, when that grown bird is released into the wild it will build a Robin's nest. (...) The question, as asked previously, is by which evolutionary means could this information have come about originally?



Just like the crows example. A mutation leads to a change in behavior. If this change of behavior offers a reproduction advantage, it gets preferred by natural selection and replaces the old behavior.

Early birds probably didn't have nests, but hatched their eggs on the ground. Later birds built nests on the ground, and this eventually evolved into building more sophisticated nests in trees.

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As has been pointed out, mutations (harmful or beneficial) do not add new information to the any creature.



Yes, this is the basic creationist belief, but as they failed so far to give any proof for this other than their faith, I consider this belief unfounded.

Simple math tells you that a random mutation mostly is information neutral, but sometimes adds information ("alleles") to the gene pool. This usually happens when a changed DNA sequence codes a different proteine with a new property that didn't exist before. There are many examples (which are however all disputed by creationists) of the development of new alleles not only within millions of years, but even within our lifetime. If you read all of this thread you'll find some of them - antibiotics resistence, temperature resistence, Milano mutation, etc, and maybe even crow behavior.

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While some here may argue that instinct is not in the realm of evolution I would obviously disagree. As stated from the beginning, evolution must account for more then the various species that inhabit planet Earth (i.e. the physical form of the creature). It must also explain the evolution of instinct (unlearned behavior) and even the ability to learn (since this is, in itself, additional information that the original protein would not have had). This leads us even to the evolution of conscienceness (sp? ... sorry ... I am tired ). The original protein could not have had human thinking. Therefore, according to evolutionary thinking, this too had to have come about by evolutionary processess.



I agree. But science can not yet answer the question about how consciousness works, let alone how it developed. The materialist view is that a complex enough brain automatically develops consciousness.

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What we then have to ask is where did these birds get the ability to reason out the puzzle of placing the nut where the wheel would roll?



I don't know whether there has been research into this. My guess: A bird aquired the behavior to drop the nut on the street instead of rock. This gave him an advantage when he lived close to traffic lights, thus this behavior spread. Further mutations let the birds only drop the nut in certain situtions, i.e. when the traffic stopped, and only in front of the wheels. Learning probably was also involved - for instance, pick up the nuts only when the traffic wasn't going.