Originally Posted By: mechtech2
Who cares if I call a spider a bug or insect? We all know the arbitrary and recent technical name given them.
How petty can you get!
You can go ahead and believe they are 'extremely intelligent'.
I don't.
You are relentlessly sloppy in your use of language. Spiders and insects are different things, period. Is it petty to point out that gasoline engines and diesels are different? Now you throw the term "bug" into the mix. For one who professes knowledge of such things, that's pretty imprecise.
Petty? You jumped into this one and declared everyone else's observations of these animals to be invalid.
And finally, you pump out a smokescreen by misquoting and misrepresenting what's been said up to now. It's well beyond "petty" to suggest that I characterized these spiders as "extremely intelligent". I did not. Nowhere. The OP did, but if you want to complain about pettiness, you should consider the old "glass house" problem. It is clear from the context that what the OP meant was "extremely intelligent, compared to other spiders", or some other such similar verbage.
Of course these spiders are dependent upon instinctive behaviors, but, as noted by the others, and whatever you care to call it, they show the ability to adapt their behavior in ways that other similar animals do not, and more critically, in ways which indicate mental processing beyond mere instinct. One more time, no, they're not eight-legged Einsteins, but they do show responsive ability beyond that of their "peers". You may, of course, call it what you like.
