Agree! I just think “being taught” might be a wrong frame. As a though excercise, imagine evolution “hardcoded” the concept of “bear” directly in DNA like this:
Make a structure in the brain that pattern matches a few characteristics of a bear
Make this stucture capture and save other signals present at the time trigger first fired
If parents reliably show pictures of bears to kids, then this concept will be created in everyone, even though true description of “bear” might be orders of magnitude more complex.
People would normally call this thing “learning”, but I think you might also call this compressed encoding (or compilation), because you could not have learned anything else.
There’s pretty clear evidence that the human brain has the concepts “snake” and “spider” genetically encoded in it, as pre-grown neural recognition circuits for their shapes and movement styles. Yes, they really are creepy — to humans. Humans are not instinctively afraid of either snakes or spiders, but there’s good experimental evidence that we’re genetically predisposed to specifically recognize them and to quickly and efficiently learn to be afraid of any specific type of snake or spider, if and only if we see adults in our community act afraid of that type, often in as little as a single exposure to this behavior. So we’re instinctively poised to rapidly learn to be afraid of any specific types of snakes and spiders that our community fears. Which is a fascinating example of instinctively predisposed cultural learning.
Stuff like this is the reason the old Nature-vs-Nurture argument was particularly unhelpful: the answer isn’t just “usually both”, it’s often “a subtle intricately-interleaved combination of the two”: genetic and cultural coevolution.
Agree! I just think “being taught” might be a wrong frame. As a though excercise, imagine evolution “hardcoded” the concept of “bear” directly in DNA like this:
Make a structure in the brain that pattern matches a few characteristics of a bear
Make this stucture capture and save other signals present at the time trigger first fired
If parents reliably show pictures of bears to kids, then this concept will be created in everyone, even though true description of “bear” might be orders of magnitude more complex.
People would normally call this thing “learning”, but I think you might also call this compressed encoding (or compilation), because you could not have learned anything else.
There’s pretty clear evidence that the human brain has the concepts “snake” and “spider” genetically encoded in it, as pre-grown neural recognition circuits for their shapes and movement styles. Yes, they really are creepy — to humans. Humans are not instinctively afraid of either snakes or spiders, but there’s good experimental evidence that we’re genetically predisposed to specifically recognize them and to quickly and efficiently learn to be afraid of any specific type of snake or spider, if and only if we see adults in our community act afraid of that type, often in as little as a single exposure to this behavior. So we’re instinctively poised to rapidly learn to be afraid of any specific types of snakes and spiders that our community fears. Which is a fascinating example of instinctively predisposed cultural learning.
Stuff like this is the reason the old Nature-vs-Nurture argument was particularly unhelpful: the answer isn’t just “usually both”, it’s often “a subtle intricately-interleaved combination of the two”: genetic and cultural coevolution.