Interesting point. I read at some point that primates, humans included could not swim “instinctively” but had to learn. Or if they didn’t learn would drown if they couldn’t walk out of the water. In contrast, most other animals I read are instinctive swimmers.
Then I looked at my dog in a pool. What he does is try to run while he is in the pool. The effect is he gets enough lift to keep his efficient-for-swimming head on a neck above body above water, and he gets forward thrust. My insight/guess was that it wasn’t so much that someone or something put something in the dog to make him swim “instinctively,” but that dog-ancestors who’s natural gaits did not translate to swimming when tried in water survived sufficiently less often that the marketplace which is evolution abandoned that product line. I wondered about primates: were we just better at not falling in water so often that having a gait that worked to get us out just wasn’t as important? Was our adaptability such that primates that grew up around water learned enough swimming to get by and primates who weren’t around water had insufficient value in swimming? Were the costs of finding a “natural” gait that worked in water for the primate just too much higher than finding gaits that worked for our four-legged friends?
So I think we are pre-programmed to walk, to talk, to run, not by some neurologic programming, but by the shapes and attachments of our muscles and bones. There are just so many possible solutions that yield useful motions, with walking and running in the standard way really quite good uses of the facilities available. But we see often, more with talking that walking, someone who learns things slightly non-optimally and if caught early is untrained and then retrained.
I think a lot of our “instinct” for walking and probably other physical things we do is stored in our muscles and bones, and almost invariably, our adaptive neural systems find them in there.
Interesting point. I read at some point that primates, humans included could not swim “instinctively” but had to learn. Or if they didn’t learn would drown if they couldn’t walk out of the water. In contrast, most other animals I read are instinctive swimmers.
Then I looked at my dog in a pool. What he does is try to run while he is in the pool. The effect is he gets enough lift to keep his efficient-for-swimming head on a neck above body above water, and he gets forward thrust. My insight/guess was that it wasn’t so much that someone or something put something in the dog to make him swim “instinctively,” but that dog-ancestors who’s natural gaits did not translate to swimming when tried in water survived sufficiently less often that the marketplace which is evolution abandoned that product line. I wondered about primates: were we just better at not falling in water so often that having a gait that worked to get us out just wasn’t as important? Was our adaptability such that primates that grew up around water learned enough swimming to get by and primates who weren’t around water had insufficient value in swimming? Were the costs of finding a “natural” gait that worked in water for the primate just too much higher than finding gaits that worked for our four-legged friends?
So I think we are pre-programmed to walk, to talk, to run, not by some neurologic programming, but by the shapes and attachments of our muscles and bones. There are just so many possible solutions that yield useful motions, with walking and running in the standard way really quite good uses of the facilities available. But we see often, more with talking that walking, someone who learns things slightly non-optimally and if caught early is untrained and then retrained.
I think a lot of our “instinct” for walking and probably other physical things we do is stored in our muscles and bones, and almost invariably, our adaptive neural systems find them in there.
Apparently infants know how to kind of swim for the first few months.