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by HumanOstrich 546 days ago
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.

1 comments

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?
The research disagrees with you.
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.)