[tsimionescu]

Adding to the other comment, it's quite clear that animals, and especially humans, act and learn based on many orders of magnitude less experiences than pure RL needs, especially when discussing higher order behaviors. We obviously have some systems that use inductive and deductive reasoning, heuristics, simplistic physical intuitions, agent modeling and other such mechanisms, that do not resemble ML at all.

I would say that it is likely, intuitively, that these systems were trained through things that look much like RL in the millions of years of evolution. But that process is obviously not getting repeated in each individual organism, who is born largely pre-trained.

And for any doubt, the poverty of the stimulus argument should put it to rest, especially when looking at simpler organisms than vertebrates, which can go from egg to functional sensing, moving, eating, predator avoiding in a matter of minutes or hours.