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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the headline is not that they reevolved the ability, but that they had to relearn flight. I was expecting it to say more that many of the strategies that were dominate for flight died off. I was guessing dominate air currents higher up, possibly something crazy like a change in dominate gasses.

Point being, same basic birds. Just new advantages steering dominate flight patterns. Not a new mechanism of flight.

(Which, yeah, I guess that is all part and parcel of evolution...)

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I'm not a native English speaker, but AFAIUI "learning" is typically used for individuals and not a species? I think I've seen it used before about species, but it seems to imply some sort of teleology which is decidedly not what happens in evolution. (Though it sometimes might seem like it does!)

This is more of a semantic discussion: after a while, there will be individuals with better strategies to survive and reproduce (this is the implicit teleology of evolution: living things live on, dead things go extinct). You don't even need someone giving this orders because we define living things as those who live (research communities can't even agree on the definition of life - see viruses). Our words imply specific meaning.

I guess you mean that there is another meaning in the word "learning" in that context: That the species follows a specific purpose. But what is the species? The aggregation of all individuals of some kind (the research community can't even agree on a definition for "species").

Some individuals will do stuff or become something (due to genetic modifications) that gives them more resources or better reproduction rates - sometimes individuals will learn and teach it to their offspring. If it's a good strategy, the species will contain a lot of individuals who acquired this strategy.

So I guess "learning" is accurate enough for common usage.

Yeah, I guess I was just a bit surprised by "learning" because it does sort of imply "learning by experience" which isn't really a thing when it comes to evolution.

I do agree, it's probably just a bit "too semantics", though I do feel it pretty important in science reporting to be as accurate as possible and to try to avoid fostering misconceptions as far as possible. (Let's face it, popular science reporting doesn't have a great record on this. Hell, even university PR departments[1] are culpable.)

[1] It's amazing that there even is such a thing, but I guess we just have to deal.

I’m not sure I really understand the difference between learning, adaptation, intelligence, and evolution.

I feel like people choose which one to use based on which timescales and action substrates they want to privilege, but I don’t know... is there a technical distinction?

Maybe this is more than semantic discrepancies here. There is evidence for "learning by experience" that can be inherited. I suggest reading about epigenetics and how the experiences of your ancestors might be encoded using switches on your DNA (which turn areas on or off and gives the organism a way to pass on knowledge - hence "learning by experience" supported by epigenetics).

See e.g. [1] or [2] - even simpler organisms like worms have this ability, it is very likely that we also have those capabilities (because we are descended from simpler organisms).

I hope that you find something interesting in the current research of biology and psychology, some things are not like what we used to think.

[1] http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences... [2] https://futurism.com/memories-can-inherited-scientists-may-j...

I think this is right. I just don't encounter that much speaking of species, if that makes sense. Most of the speech about species is often anecdotal, at best.

I think you both squared it correctly calling it a semantic debate. I wasn't trying to call you out as wrong. My caveat at the end was supposed to be how I realized this is shifted when talking about evolution. Rather, I was attempting the principal of charity.

I do fully agree that scientific writing should be more precise. However, I also think scientific readers should accept that there is a lot of context that goes into making some terms specific. To the point that it is best to have a readership that is attempting to reach a common understanding, not one that is expecting to be given vanilla facts.

Learning is used in more general ways. Buildings learn, according to Stewart Brand. Evolution learns. Populations learn. Police forces learn techniques for dealing with new types of crime. Criminal gangs learn new ways to evade the police. Physics has learned from chemistry, and vice versa. etc., etc.

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