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_heimdall 10 hours ago

Are you proposing that as an example that animals (and humans) seem to be born with natural instincts for survival or that we know they are born with that information?

If the latter, how do you propose we know that as a fact? Presumably we would really need to know how that information is passed down to the child and how it knows how to interpret it. To my best understanding, we effectively stop at DNA seeming to be a complex set of instructions for how to make the animal. We don't know if or how it might encode knowledge, or if something else entirely is at play to make those instincts known to the newborn.

csomar 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Watch the video. The iguana just hatched and is already going on insane escape from snakes. That information has to be encoded there from the start. Thus without it would have been probably naturally selected out.

_heimdall 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree it seems highly likely, I just can't make the leap to "has to be" when we know so little (if anything?) about how that would work.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic here, if so that wasn't my intent. I very much agree that anything being born seems to already known more than we give credit for, I just can't do absolute certainty there.