Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.

It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.

Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.

> It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born.

A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known as St Johns Water Dogs. They have multiple aquatic adaptations: the "otter tail", oily fur, and webbed feet. (Some of these are shared with other water-oriented breeds.) Some lines of Labradors, especially the "bench" or English dogs, normally retain this full suite of water adaptations.

But the wild thing about these particular Labradors is that they love to swim, and that most of them are born knowing how to swim very well. But they don't know that they know how to swim. So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.

The near-instant transformation from "fascinated by water and fearing it" to "hey I can swim and this is the absolute best thing ever" is remarkable to watch, though not recommended.

I remember another Lab, who'd been afraid to go swimming, who one day impulsively bolted for the water, took an impressive leap off a rock, and (from his reaction) apparently realized in mid-air that he had no idea what he was going to do next. Once he hit the water, he was fortunately fine, to the great relief of his owner.

CAUTION: This behavior pattern is apparently NOT universal in Labs. Owners of "field" or American Labs seem to have much better thought-out protocols for introducing hunting dogs to water, and failure to follow these protocols may result in bad experiences, dogs that fear water, and actual danger to dogs. So please consult an expert.

One of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.”

A three day old horse can walk.

A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already.

But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.

One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.

But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.

IIRC Andrej Karpathy in a recent talk made a point that reading a book isn't like memorizing the book, it's more like prompting the brain with the book.

So maybe this concept of being ready to go at birth isn't about the animals ability to start doing things but just a way of upbringing regardless of how ready the animal is to function. Maybe pigs just start prompting early. AFAIK human babies can swim right out of the womb. In other words, maybe the distinction between precocial and non-precocial(I don't know if there's a word for that) animals isn't that clear?

I have an anecdote that sounds like it fits this...

The house I used to live in had a ton of blue tailed skinks around it. You could always spot a baby by its size and brightness of the blue in its tail (juveniles have a brighter hue, adults are more brown). To avoid birds, the skinks would do this shimmy under the siding of the house just across from my back porch. What surprised me is that even the babies, maybe a few days old, all knew how to do the siding shimmy. Young, old, didn't matter, you could tell they just knew how (and why) to do it.

I'm immediately fascinated by what I imagine are core questions explored by this domain. Largely the trade-offs. It's almost like choosing to ship a product with a hard-coded configuration vs. a more complex "discover and self-calibrate" phase.

Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming?

Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.

> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.

Early young borns that could walk, like a baby giraffe or baby rhino, often fall down or get exhausted quickly initially; tons of youtube videos show that. Humans are slow learners here, but I would not call these other animals as "born knowing how to walk" if their initial steps are so insecure. Their body structure is different though - a newborn human is basically pretty crap-built. A baby deer kind of is built differently on birth and that also makes sense if you are threatened by other predator animals like wolves or bears or lions.

I think all animals are born knowing how to walk, including monkeys and humans. However, that trait only surfaces at a later stage of their development.

You can’t tell me the information and programming for all the is stored in an egg/sperm cell

I wonder at which point in evolution did organisms decide to embed prototypical structures to save time at birth

> They are born knowing how to walk.

I'm not aware of any way we can know this. We do know that those species are born with the physical ability to walk within the first few hours after birth. How could we distinguish between whether they were born with the knowledge of how to walk as opposed to them learning it quickly since their body can physically do it?

If you're a prey animal being born in open terrain, you need to be able to run at full speed right away.

> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born

That trade has an extreme genetic advantage when other animals see you as their succulent mains on the a la carte exotic wildlife menu.

is it true that it's a tradeoff ? the "more precocial" the less flexibility to learn new things ? on the contrary knowing less equals less assumptions, which needs more flexibility in exchange.

Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?

> precocial

I thought you misspelled presocial, but precoial is etymologically related to precocious, both originally meaning early-maturing or something along those lines.

> They are born knowing how to walk.

This is unlikely to be a good way to think about them. The norm is for animals to be born knowing how to move. Whether they actually can move shortly after birth is more of a question of muscle development than knowledge.

For example, when birds are held immobile until they're old enough to fly, they fly normally.