alt Hacker NewsIt’s always amazed me how much capability baby animals have right when they’re born, when they have near zero experience with their muscles and balance and senses. Or even just the instinct of a cat to chase a string is universal.
There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase.
I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.
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What's also fun to think about is the compression ratio of that data. the human genome is in the 725MB range.
Evolution is kinda like pre-training in a sense.
Also illustrates an adaptability-ability trade-off. A human baby is supplied a SOTA brain and sensors and actuators it can make sense of given time. A deer baby is preprogrammed to handle its sensors and actuators. In time, the human baby surpasses the deer baby in general ability.
To be fair, it's not like the baby animals pop into existence at birth, starting from scratch at that moment, but instead they've been growing/incubating for quite some time. Who knows, maybe that's the actual "training phase" for the animals, as what you say is true, they seem to have a lot of instincts already at birth, while human babies seem to almost "popped into existence at birth" with not a whole lot of instincts yet, compared to other animals at least.