[bigprof]

> Similarly, many of humans' capabilities are pretrained with massive computing through evolution.

Hmm .. my intuition is that humans' capabilities are gained during early childhood (walking, running, speaking .. etc) ... what are examples of capabilities pretrained by evolution, and how does this work?

[tiborsaas]

If you look at animals, they can walk in hours, not much time needed after being born. It takes us a longer time because we are born rather undeveloped to get the head out of the birth canal.

A more high level example, sea sickness is a evolutionary pre-learned thing, your body things it's poisoned and it automatically wants to empty your stomach.

[nopinsight]

The brain is predisposed to learn those skills. Early childhood experiences are necessary to complete the training. Perhaps that could be likened to post-training. It's not a one-to-one comparison but a rather loose analogy which I didn't make it precise because it is not the key point of the argument.

Maybe evolution could be better thought of as neural architecture search combined with some pretraining. Evidence suggests we are prebuilt with "core knowledge" by the time we're born [1].

See: Summary of cool research gained from clever & benign experiments with babies here:

[1] Core knowledge. Elizabeth S. Spelke and Katherine D. Kinzler. https://www.harvardlds.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Spelke...

[vanviegen]

> The brain is predisposed to learn those skills.

Learning to walk doesn't seem to be particularly easy, having observed the process with my own children. No easier than riding a bike or skating, for which our brains are probably not 'predisposed'.

[nopinsight]

Walking is indeed a complex skill. Yet some animals walk minutes after birth. Human babies are most likely born premature due to the large brain and related physical constraints.

Young children learn to bike or skate at an older age after they have acquired basic physical skills.

Check out the reference to Core Knowledge above. There are things young infants know or are predisposed to know from birth.

[HumanOstrich]

The brain has developed, through evolution, very specific and organized structures that allow us to learn language and reading skills. If you have a genetic defect that causes those structures to be faulty or missing, you will have severe developmental problems.

That seems like a decent example of pretraining through evolution.

[tesch1]

But maybe it's something more like general symbolic manipulation, and not specifically the sounds or structure of language. Reading is fairly new and unlikely to have had much if any evolutionary pressure in many populations who are now quite literate. Same seems true for music. Maybe the hardware is actually more general and adaptable and not just for language?

[HumanOstrich]

The research disagrees with you.

[eru]

Music is really, really old.

And reading and music co-evolved to be relatively easy for humans to do.

(See how computers have a much easier time reading barcodes and QR codes, with much less general processing power than it takes them to decipher human hand-writing. But good luck trying to teach humans to read QR codes fluently.)

[eru]

> No easier than riding a bike or skating, for which our brains are probably not 'predisposed'.

What makes you think so? Humans came up with biking and skating, because they were easy enough for us to master with the hardware we had.

[puffybuf]

I think of evolution as unassisted learning where agents compete with the each other for limited resources. Over time they get better and better at surviving by passing on genes. It never ends of course.

[eru]

Your brain is well adapted to learning how to walk and speak.

Chimpanzees score pretty high on many tests of intelligence, especially short term working memory. But they can't really learn language: they lack the specialised hardware more than the general intelligence.

[gf000]

I mean, there are plenty - e.g. mimicking (say, the mother's face's emotions), which are precursors to learning more advanced "features". Also, even walking has many aspects pretrained (I assume it's mostly a musculoskeletal limitation that we can't walk immediately), humans are just born "prematurely" due to our relatively huge heads. Newborn horses can walk immediately without learning.

But there are plenty of non-learned control/movement/sensing in utero that are "pretrained".

[eru]

Interestingly, there's a bunch of reflexes that also only develop over time.

They are more nature than nurture, but they aren't 'in-born'.

Just like human aren't (usually) born with teeth, but they don't 'learn' to have teeth or pubic hair, either.