Comment by ordu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ordu | Hacker News Reader

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How baby deer learns to walk in a few hours after birth? It needs to control four limbs to keep balance. Animals tend to have some forms of behavior that they learn in a few tries or even from the very first try. But at the same time they may be very bad at learning other kinds of behavior that seem no more difficult for us.

Homo Sapience is special in this regard with almost all their firmware broken. Homo Sapience needs to learn hard how to focus their eyes or to hold head or to walk and even how to crawl. Seems like our abilities to learn are linked with brokenness of our innate software, probably it is a double headed causal arrow: our software is broken because we could overcome it with our general abilities to learn, and our general abilities to learn evolved because without them and without working genetic programs for specific forms of behavior we would be doomed.

I can't help but think that autism is the next step at breaking innate software and developing more robust general learning mechanisms.

Practically speaking humans are born relatively underdeveloped and spend much of their first year catching up to where other animals start. If we spent more time baking we would have trouble getting out of the birth canal because we have such large heads (we already have enough trouble as is). It's easy to conjecture how that may have come to be. Marsupials are an interesting comparison with similar but different traits.

For what it's worth there are also countless animals which start out very helpless, including many birds which are wholly incapable of flight for some time, and for which learning is not always an easy process. The bird in question is closer to an exception than a rule.

> if we spent more time baking we would have trouble getting out of the birth canal because we have such large heads

Human birth seems strangely difficult. If you’ve never witnessed a live human birth it’s very traumatic with lots and lots of things that can/do go wrong. I can’t think of another mammal that struggles as hard as humans do during birth. It makes me wonder how humans have survived as long as we have.

Well, historically, we didn't. Infant mortality is continuously at record lows. Modern medicine means that we can handle many things that can/do go wrong.

We're effectively propagating that difficulty and it compounds generationally (imagine your bloodline has unusually large heads...) but we're smart enough to circumvent fate and the net result would appear to be positive.

Much of what humans do approaches the limit of cutting off the nose to spite the face. Is life better than it has ever been, practically speaking, everywhere? With some exception granted to the last couple of years, yes, and even without, probably yes.

I find it rather disturbing to think about. Diversification is really our only long term hope (hedging so to speak) and in many ways we're constantly moving away from that. If we were suddenly space faring colonizers, or if there were another dark age, then that would cease to be true, for better or for worse.

Our heads are big to fit our brain. Our pelvis is shaped and structured for upright gait, and so not big. The struggle is indirectly due to the traits that drive or success.

Are our heads actually unusually big, for a mammal scaled to our size? I've often wondered about this.

Especially for a mammal with front-facing eyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–body_mass_ratio

It's interesting to note our peers in this regard. Mice have a two-piece pelvis, and dolphins have no pelvis at all.

OMG of course there's a wikipedia page for it!

Thank you :-)

"If you’ve never witnessed a live human birth it’s very traumatic with lots and lots of things that can/do go wrong."

I think that is a specific cultural view, to assume it is traumatic. I certainly did not think so.

And that human birth is hard, has the evolutionary roots in going bipedal and walking upright as far as I know. Being upright blocks the pelvis, being down, opens it. Apes who go 4 feet, do not struggle (so hard).

> I certainly did not think so.

Were you the one giving birth?

No, but it was implied, witnessing alone is traumatic. (And I did witnessed other becoming fathers, who couldn't handle it and required medical attention themself)

And certainly quite some women experience it as traumatic, but not all of them.

I don't think it was necessarily implied, actually. Depends how you parse that sentence. For example it goes on to say "and lots of things can go wrong". But that is very much about the birth, not the observation.

Either way, I am not sure that watching a couple of births qualifies anyone to say whether birth being "traumatic" is a question of cultural assumption :-)

"Either way, I am not sure that watching a couple of births qualifies anyone to say whether birth being "traumatic" is a question of cultural assumption"

No, but talking with women who say convincingly, they did not perceive it as traumatic is enough for me to conclude that births are not traumatic by itself. They can be, but I have the suspicion, that is culturally enforced, but that seems to change slowly.

> The bird in question is closer to an exception than a rule.

It doesn't flop out of the nest immediately after leaving the egg, though, right? This is more like a 3 year old child learning to ride a bike on the first go (still impressive) than a newborn infant doing so.

I don’t think firmware is broken. Baby deer also doesn’t have to learn anything - it is just starting up muscles that is hardware problem. The same with baby humans you have to get your hardware so muscles prepared to get rest of the body up.

Of course there is that bit where control of the muscles also has to align so there is building up of neural pathways that can be also more like getting hardware wired up. Getting it wired up takes longer in humans.

I remember something like humans are born earlier underdeveloped compared to other mammals because are pelvis is smaller to allow standing up. As a side effect some brain development happens after birth.

This allows for more social/environmental impact on development than pure genetics, and we have developed better language and understanding.

There are no "because", just speculation.

There is no physical limit why we can't have both. .. and we don't have datapoints for time to evolve for every trails.

I hate it when biologists talked as if they knew it all

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