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Comment by _heimdall

4 days ago

> 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?

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_heimdall

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csomar  4 days ago

How about running from snakes for their lives right after they hatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4CQj-TCbA

  • _heimdall  4 days ago

    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.

    • csomar  4 days ago

      Watch the video. The iguana just hatched and is already going on insane escape from snakes. That information has to be encoded there from the start. Thus without it would have been probably naturally selected out.

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