Comment by Animats
4 days ago
Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
> It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born.
A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known as St Johns Water Dogs. They have multiple aquatic adaptations: the "otter tail", oily fur, and webbed feet. (Some of these are shared with other water-oriented breeds.) Some lines of Labradors, especially the "bench" or English dogs, normally retain this full suite of water adaptations.
But the wild thing about these particular Labradors is that they love to swim, and that most of them are born knowing how to swim very well. But they don't know that they know how to swim. So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.
The near-instant transformation from "fascinated by water and fearing it" to "hey I can swim and this is the absolute best thing ever" is remarkable to watch, though not recommended.
I remember another Lab, who'd been afraid to go swimming, who one day impulsively bolted for the water, took an impressive leap off a rock, and (from his reaction) apparently realized in mid-air that he had no idea what he was going to do next. Once he hit the water, he was fortunately fine, to the great relief of his owner.
CAUTION: This behavior pattern is apparently NOT universal in Labs. Owners of "field" or American Labs seem to have much better thought-out protocols for introducing hunting dogs to water, and failure to follow these protocols may result in bad experiences, dogs that fear water, and actual danger to dogs. So please consult an expert.
This behavior has practically nothing to do with Labradors. Many, many dogs regardless of breed can do this. Cats too. And foxes and wolves and rats and... well pretty much all quadrupeds with reasonable sizes limbs relative to their body. You might notice it's more or less the same motion as walking. Animals that drown usually do so from exhaustion, not because they can't keep their head above water.
Primates are relatively unique in their complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
> Primates are relatively unique in their complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
Human babies can swim, so it's maybe more initially an innate one that gets lost. Though they won't be able to keep their head over water by default if that's what you meant (can be trained to as a toddler). But I'm talking about swimming on the umbilical in water births, etc., showing that there isn't a complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
Yes, while these motor reflexes are not innate, autonomic responses remain. Search for the "mammalian diving reflex".
Is it "primates" or is it the strange semi/erect limb attachment that primates have?
> So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.
Interesting, I didn’t know this was a common phenomenon! It describes exactly what happened with my childhood lab - my family would go swimming at the river and he would whine and fuss at the shore, until one day he wanted to play with another dog that was in the water so badly that he just jumped in, and was swimming around like he’d been doing it his whole life already.
Every dog does this.
3 replies →
You may not have noticed but you are also describing an inborn fear of deep water.
Does the dog fear drinking water? No. So the dog specifically fears deep water. What taught him to specifically fear deep water over a bowl of water? Most likely he was also born with the fear.
This also tells us that evolution often results in conflicting instincts… a fear of water and an instinct to swim. Most likely what occurred here is an early ancestor of the lab originally feared water and was not adapted to swim well. The feature that allowed it to swim well came later and is sort of like retrofitting a car to swim. You need to wait a really long time for the car to evolve into a submarine (see seals). Likely much earlier before becoming a seal an animal facing selection pressure to go back into being a marine animal will evolve away the fear of deep water. It’s just that labs haven’t fully hit this transitional period yet.
Is it fear of deep water, or fear of walking on a strange surface that might be unsafe? How does a dog know water is deep? Does a dog think its water bowl is deep?
You can pen a horse by painting stripes on the ground around it.
2 replies →
Or, having been a fish once upon a time[1] might explain why we're pre-wired to swim or to just (figure it out)
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15547790
Even if you can swim, it doesn't mean all water is safe to swim in. Being cautious seems reasonable.
All dogs know how to swim. Afaik all *animals" know how to swim. No idea what labs have to do with any of this.
When I was young we had golden retriever and the first time he saw my neighbors pool he dove in immediately and started swimming. He wasn't a complete puppy so maybe he was more confident in his ability.
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
One of my kids could stand on the day she was born. She seemed super strong, so while I held her I just took my hands away, and she stood there and stared at the rest of the family. Lasted a good 10 seconds, then I thought it was enough.
My boy is 2mo old and he could lock his legs with extreme strength in the first few days. I was very impressed, but my wife told me to stop letting his legs hold any weight. Apparently his uncle was walking at 9mo but his body wasn't ready and he gave himself a hernia.
According to my wife, who is an OT, children are born with a reflex that straightens their legs and which sounds similar to what you saw.
She said they lose the reflex during their first year, and then develop the actual skill of standing separately.
It was fun to watch with our kids, too!
2 replies →
Babies have strong legs in order to push themselves out of the womb
>> One of my kids could stand on the day she was born. She seemed super strong, so while I held her I just took my hands away, and she stood there and stared at the rest of the family. Lasted a good 10 seconds, then I thought it was enough.
Probably a good experience. However, at that age it may have been a setback if the kid fell down and got hurt because they weren't strong or coordinated enough. The experience (good or bad) of doing something for the first time can be very influential on future behavior.
If we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
If gravity were lower we would have evolved differently, walking would have adapted too. On the other hand babies probably wouldn't be able to walk either. Being mobile, defenseless, and not having "runaway!" as the default defense mechanism (like horses) is an evolutionary dead end.
1 reply →
Problem is we don't have any good data about which gravitational accelerations would be suitable for long term health. We have 1g as our baseline, and we know that months in 0g messes you up and longer is a bad idea. We don't know anything about the long-term effects of living in Mars or Lunar gravity though. It could be studied using von Braun stations, but nobody has done it.
The moon has very little gravity bringing extra problems, but maybe Mars would have the right gravity to enable Babies walk from the beginning?
9 replies →
Walking would probably suck on such a planet and we would see babies bounding long distances instead!
IIRC they also have a swimming/diving instinct/reflex, which they similarly seem to unlearn after a while.
Infants will also grip anything you place in their hands.
1 reply →
One of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.”
A three day old horse can walk.
A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already.
But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.
What if a 3 day old human knew how to walk? I don't think that would look any different, because they physically can't do it anyway.
The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk.
A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain.
What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior.
The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.
It really is strange how slowly humans grow to full size, and then stop.
Other animals grow in under a year or two, or never stop growing until they die.
How closely is physical size related to mental maturity?
Do other animals mentally mature approximately when they reach full size?
I'm not sure it's all _that_ unique. Elephants are physically mature at 15 to 20, say, so not that different to humans. Other apes are also similarish to humans in this.
1 reply →
Example of an animal which keeps growing until it dies ?
1 reply →
> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
Next time I’m at the zoo, I’ll run this by the zebras to see what they think.
:) I’m being sarcastic but it seems self evident to me that human cognition is a unique treasure on this planet and—while it’s true that ants and octopus and other creatures do some amazing things—-they’re not even close to us. We can agree to disagree but I’m just psyched about the psyche.
1 reply →
I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
36 replies →
Homan cognition is more advanced than in any other animal. I think it is clear enough. Humans are not the only animals that evolved higher intelligence, but we have a combination of attributes that made it really effective: we are larger animals (with room for a big brain) with a social structure and a relatively long lifespan (good for passing knowledge).
Ants beat us when it comes to society, but in a sense, we may also consider multicellular organisms as a society of single cells. Still impressive, and there is a good chance for ants to outlive us as a species, but we are still orders of magnitude more intelligent than ants, including collective intelligence.
By intelligence, I mean things like adaptability and problem solving, both collective and individual. It is evident in our ability to exploit resources no animals could, or our ability to live in places that would normally be unsurvivable to us. It doesn't mean we are the pinnacle of evolution, we have some pretty good competitors (including ants) but we are certainly the most advanced in one very imporant area.
1 reply →
The whole "3 year old tiger is already a mother" thing makes perfect sense when you think about relative life spans.
I don't expect my dog to wait to have puppies until it's past 18, because many dogs don't even live that long!
Scaling for lifespan they are having kids at ~14 which humans can do, but the average first time mother in the US is 27.5.
7 replies →
> But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
It is amazing.
I would make a stronger claim, however. That is, I would qualify these comparisons as analogous. When people say that adult members of some species are "smarter" than a human child of age X, because they can do Y while the child still can't, then this is an analogous comparison. Many intellectual errors are rooted in the false dichotomy between the univocal and equivocal. So, if I ask, if an animal of species X doing Y is doing the same thing as a human being doing Y, some people will take the univocal position, because there is an appearance of the same thing going on (few will take the equivocal position here and deny any similarity), but it is more accurate to say that something analogical is happening. A dog eating is like a human being eating in some sense, but they are not univocal, nor are they totally dissimilar.
IIRC Andrej Karpathy in a recent talk made a point that reading a book isn't like memorizing the book, it's more like prompting the brain with the book.
So maybe this concept of being ready to go at birth isn't about the animals ability to start doing things but just a way of upbringing regardless of how ready the animal is to function. Maybe pigs just start prompting early. AFAIK human babies can swim right out of the womb. In other words, maybe the distinction between precocial and non-precocial(I don't know if there's a word for that) animals isn't that clear?
I don't think babies can swim but they know not to try and breathe in water. Which is probably what you meant.
I think it's called "diving reflex", not very sure about it all but AFAIK babies can learn to swim properly quite early which makes me think that humans too come with a lot of "ready to go" features but maybe need some prompting to surface
1 reply →
I have an anecdote that sounds like it fits this...
The house I used to live in had a ton of blue tailed skinks around it. You could always spot a baby by its size and brightness of the blue in its tail (juveniles have a brighter hue, adults are more brown). To avoid birds, the skinks would do this shimmy under the siding of the house just across from my back porch. What surprised me is that even the babies, maybe a few days old, all knew how to do the siding shimmy. Young, old, didn't matter, you could tell they just knew how (and why) to do it.
> They are born knowing how to walk
Most animals know how to walk. They have pre-build 'knowledge' and start with it when they get muscles. The main difference is some species develop muscles before they are borne. Others don't, some can't even see. But as soon as they develop they can walk without even seeing how others do it. The same way birds can learn, or be trained to fly without seeing examples. They start flapping both wings in sync, this is pre-build.
You forgot to mention the most important part: Those animals are the norm, it's us humans who are the outliers! Of course we have remnants of this knowledge and models of the world that formed our ancestors DNA for Millions of yers in us. Our ancestors newborns were as independent as these other animal children.
The only difference is that our heads are too big, so we are born prematurely. The term precocial is misleading. We aren't the norm, we are the outliers, human newborn's are not a blank plate, basing your models of intelligence and learning on the assumption we are the best fit for survival in a world is bogus.
I'm immediately fascinated by what I imagine are core questions explored by this domain. Largely the trade-offs. It's almost like choosing to ship a product with a hard-coded configuration vs. a more complex "discover and self-calibrate" phase.
Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming?
Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.
> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
Early young borns that could walk, like a baby giraffe or baby rhino, often fall down or get exhausted quickly initially; tons of youtube videos show that. Humans are slow learners here, but I would not call these other animals as "born knowing how to walk" if their initial steps are so insecure. Their body structure is different though - a newborn human is basically pretty crap-built. A baby deer kind of is built differently on birth and that also makes sense if you are threatened by other predator animals like wolves or bears or lions.
There's a distinction between having the knowledge and having the physical fitness.
When someone is confined to a hospital bed for months they find that they get exhausted very quickly when they next try walking. It doesn't mean they've forgotten how.
I think all animals are born knowing how to walk, including monkeys and humans. However, that trait only surfaces at a later stage of their development.
> They are born knowing how to walk.
I'm not aware of any way we can know this. We do know that those species are born with the physical ability to walk within the first few hours after birth. How could we distinguish between whether they were born with the knowledge of how to walk as opposed to them learning it quickly since their body can physically do it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_pattern_generator#Loco...
This was very interesting to read! TIL thank you
How about running from snakes for their lives right after they hatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4CQj-TCbA
Are you proposing that as an example that animals (and humans) seem to be born with natural instincts for survival or that we know they are born with that information?
If the latter, how do you propose we know that as a fact? Presumably we would really need to know how that information is passed down to the child and how it knows how to interpret it. To my best understanding, we effectively stop at DNA seeming to be a complex set of instructions for how to make the animal. We don't know if or how it might encode knowledge, or if something else entirely is at play to make those instincts known to the newborn.
2 replies →
that was amazing, thanks for sharing!
1 reply →
> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born
That trade has an extreme genetic advantage when other animals see you as their succulent mains on the a la carte exotic wildlife menu.
I wonder at which point in evolution did organisms decide to embed prototypical structures to save time at birth
If you're a prey animal being born in open terrain, you need to be able to run at full speed right away.
You can’t tell me the information and programming for all the is stored in an egg/sperm cell
is it true that it's a tradeoff ? the "more precocial" the less flexibility to learn new things ? on the contrary knowing less equals less assumptions, which needs more flexibility in exchange.
Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?
It must be a tradeoff. I don't have any proof, but my thinking is that we pay an extraordinary price in terms of resources required to keep human babies safe for years before they can keep themselves safe. That is a strong selection pressure on everyone involved. The fact that it still happens means it must somehow be worth it.
Humans are born quite prematurely so that the head fits through the birth canal.
Naturally, I'm a dev. Could it be something to do with limited genetic storage being dedicated to software instead of coding for hardware capabilities? In my limited knowledge, increasing DNA size comes at a maintainance cost(transcription, replication etc), so there's a soft upper bound.
> precocial
I thought you misspelled presocial, but precoial is etymologically related to precocious, both originally meaning early-maturing or something along those lines.
> They are born knowing how to walk.
This is unlikely to be a good way to think about them. The norm is for animals to be born knowing how to move. Whether they actually can move shortly after birth is more of a question of muscle development than knowledge.
For example, when birds are held immobile until they're old enough to fly, they fly normally.