I’ve appreciated this comment thread! My take is that you’re all talking about different relevant things. It may well be the case that there are multiple reasons why more skills and knowledge aren’t encoded in our genomes: a) it’s hard to get that information in (from parents’ brains), b) it’s hard to get that information out (to childrens’ brains), and c) having large genomes is costly. What I’m calling the genomic bottleneck is a combination of all of them (although I think John is probably right that c) is not the main reason).
What would falsify my claim about the genomic bottleneck is if the main reason there isn’t more information passed on via genomes is because d) doing so is not very useful. That seems pretty unlikely, but not entirely out of the picture. E.g. we know that evolution is able to give baby deer the skill of walking shortly after birth, so it seems like d) might be the best explanation of why humans can’t do that too. But deer presumably evolved that skill over a very long time period, whereas I’m more interested in rapid changes.
I’ve appreciated this comment thread! My take is that you’re all talking about different relevant things. It may well be the case that there are multiple reasons why more skills and knowledge aren’t encoded in our genomes: a) it’s hard to get that information in (from parents’ brains), b) it’s hard to get that information out (to childrens’ brains), and c) having large genomes is costly. What I’m calling the genomic bottleneck is a combination of all of them (although I think John is probably right that c) is not the main reason).
What would falsify my claim about the genomic bottleneck is if the main reason there isn’t more information passed on via genomes is because d) doing so is not very useful. That seems pretty unlikely, but not entirely out of the picture. E.g. we know that evolution is able to give baby deer the skill of walking shortly after birth, so it seems like d) might be the best explanation of why humans can’t do that too. But deer presumably evolved that skill over a very long time period, whereas I’m more interested in rapid changes.