Do you think you can encode good flint-knapping technique genetically? I doubt that.
I think I agree with your point, and think it’s a more general and correct statement of the bottleneck; but, still, I think that genome does mainly affect the mind indirectly, and this is one of the constraints making it be the case that humans have lots of learning / generalizing capability. (This doesn’t just apply to humans. What are some stark examples of animals with hardwired complex behaviors? With a fairly high bar for “complex”, and a clear explanation of what is hardwired and how we know. Insects have some fairly complex behaviors, e.g. web building, ant-hill building, the tree-leaf nests of weaver ants, etc.; but IDK enough to rule out a combination of a little hardwiring, some emergence, and some learning. Lots of animals hunt after learning from their parents how to hunt. I think a lot of animals can walk right after being born? I think beavers in captivity will fruitlessly chew on wood, indicating that the wild phenotype is encoded by something simple like “enjoys chewing” (plus, learned desire for shelter), rather than “use wood for dam”.)
An operationalization of “the genome directly programs the mind” would be that things like [the motions employed in flint-knapping] can be hardwired by small numbers of mutations (and hence can be evolved given a few million relevant years). I think this isn’t true, but counterevidence would be interesting. Since the genome can’t feasibly directly encode behaviors, or at least can’t learn those quickly enough to keep up with a changing niche, the species instead evolves to learn behaviors on the fly via algorithms that generalize. If there were *either* mind-mind transfer, *or* direct programming of behavior by the genome, then higher frequency changes would be easier and there’d be less need for fluid intelligence. (In fact it’s sort of plausible to me (given my ignorance) that humans are imitation specialists and are less clever than Neanderthals were, since mind-mind transfer can replace intelligence.)
Some animal behaviours are certainly hardwired. There is the famous case of one bee species being immune to a pathogen because of a specific cleaning behaviour that is encoded by a single gene.
One important point that should be brought up in this context is sexual recombination.
if you have a part of a genome encoding a complex behaviour it can get reshuffled in the new generation. You would need some pretty powerful error correcting code to keep things working.
Do you think you can encode good flint-knapping technique genetically? I doubt that.
I think I agree with your point, and think it’s a more general and correct statement of the bottleneck; but, still, I think that genome does mainly affect the mind indirectly, and this is one of the constraints making it be the case that humans have lots of learning / generalizing capability. (This doesn’t just apply to humans. What are some stark examples of animals with hardwired complex behaviors? With a fairly high bar for “complex”, and a clear explanation of what is hardwired and how we know. Insects have some fairly complex behaviors, e.g. web building, ant-hill building, the tree-leaf nests of weaver ants, etc.; but IDK enough to rule out a combination of a little hardwiring, some emergence, and some learning. Lots of animals hunt after learning from their parents how to hunt. I think a lot of animals can walk right after being born? I think beavers in captivity will fruitlessly chew on wood, indicating that the wild phenotype is encoded by something simple like “enjoys chewing” (plus, learned desire for shelter), rather than “use wood for dam”.)
An operationalization of “the genome directly programs the mind” would be that things like [the motions employed in flint-knapping] can be hardwired by small numbers of mutations (and hence can be evolved given a few million relevant years). I think this isn’t true, but counterevidence would be interesting. Since the genome can’t feasibly directly encode behaviors, or at least can’t learn those quickly enough to keep up with a changing niche, the species instead evolves to learn behaviors on the fly via algorithms that generalize. If there were *either* mind-mind transfer, *or* direct programming of behavior by the genome, then higher frequency changes would be easier and there’d be less need for fluid intelligence. (In fact it’s sort of plausible to me (given my ignorance) that humans are imitation specialists and are less clever than Neanderthals were, since mind-mind transfer can replace intelligence.)
Some animal behaviours are certainly hardwired. There is the famous case of one bee species being immune to a pathogen because of a specific cleaning behaviour that is encoded by a single gene.
One important point that should be brought up in this context is sexual recombination.
if you have a part of a genome encoding a complex behaviour it can get reshuffled in the new generation. You would need some pretty powerful error correcting code to keep things working.