[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'.

[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.