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Article 6453 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Cockroaches
Message-ID: <BILL.92Jul14220035@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 15 Jul 92 05:00:35 GMT
References: <BILL.92Jul13114604@cortex.nsma.arizona.edu>
	<1992Jul14.031930.3423@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3118@creatures.cs.vt.edu>
	<1992Jul14.225140.6372@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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In-Reply-To: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu's message of 14 Jul 92 22: 51:40 GMT

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

     I believe it is true that cockroaches are not very adaptable, and are
   not very successful in survival.  Individual cockroaches, that is.  As a
   species, they compensate for limited individual survivability by having
   a high reproductive rate.

Well, this is kind of tangential, but I feel obliged to speak up for
the poor denigrated cockroach.  They are extremely adaptable; it is
their adaptability that allows them to thrive in such a wide variety
of unnatural environments -- for example, in houses -- where insects
with more fixed behavioral repetoires cannot long exist.  They're
pretty successful at survival, too; you have to be damned quick to
kill one, or use chemical warfare.  They are also capable of
surprising feats of learning, particularly spatial learning.  (They
can actually learn to find places by using distant landmarks, as Nick
Strausfeld, on this campus, has shown with his "roach on a hot tin
roof" experiment.)  It's hard to accept that such a nasty, ugly, dirty
creature could be the most intelligent of insects, but, with the
possible exception of the honeybee, it might well be.

	-- Bill


