Technology From Animals

http://mentalfloss.com/article/22702/10-technologies-we-stole-animal-kingdom

This article entitled “10 Technologies We Stole From the Animal Kingdom” supports Descartes’s claim that animals differ from humans because they are mechanical entities without souls. Specifically, the article speaks to the second section of Descartes’s argument that animals innate abilities or instincts prove that they act naturally or mechanically. For example, the mental floss article that I found talks about how lobsters, living in murky water 300 feet below the surface of the ocean, have “X-ray vision” far better than any of our machines. “Unlike the human eye, which views refracted images that have to be interpreted by the brain, lobsters see direct reflections that can be focused to a single point, where they are gathered together to form an image. Scientists have figured out how to copy this trick to make new X-ray machines.” Here, humans are using their ability to reason (which Descartes mentions is partly what separates us from animals) to replicate the biological ingenuities of the lobster.

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