Technically, he didn't get it right unless he derived the idea from observations by a valid method.

If you just make up some stuff, say in a science fiction book, which then turns out to sound like something scientists discover 100 years later to be a fact, that doesn't mean you were right. It's just an interesting coincidence.

Errnt. Wrong. The judges cannot accept your answer.

What the chicks are doing is tracking perceptual sets. They deal with each capsule as a separate entity, and can keep track of some upper limit on the number of those entities. The fact that there is an upper limit on what they can track proves that is is what's happening.

If they were actually "counting", there would be no upper limit to the number of entities they could track. That's what counting is - an inductive method for reducing a set of entities to the set's order, making it one abstract intellectual entity.

Newsflash one: The ability to experience pain is not the basis of the "moral status" of any animal.

Newsflash two: There is no such thing as a "moral duty". Morality is not a list of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots.

Newsflash three: There are no qualifications for the job of "ethicist". None. Anyone with a label machine and too much free time can make a badge for himself and - poof! - become an "ethicist".

allocation of society's resources toward themselves

"Society" does not have resources that people "allocate to themselves". That one phrase gives away your basic worldview, and explains the vehemence you feel toward anyone who believes that they can achieve individual success - that any one can earn what they have.

External factors do exist. No one with any sense would deny that. But do you really believe that individual skill and effort has no effect on that individual's personal outcomes? That their actual outcomes are truly defined by external factors not within their control, and not, perhaps, by their ability to foresee, plan for, and possibly deal with those facts?

The view that individuals never actually deserve to have more than others, that they just grab an unfair cut from a collectively-owned pool of "resources", is really just hatred of others for being successful.

Envy is such an ugly emotion.