Humans can walk. Pretty crazy huh? Constantly balancing tens of kilograms on top of constantly shifting upside-down pendulums, one (or okay, a few) misstep(s) from death (depending on where you are walking). We can even learn to do so on stilts, or ride bikes, or pilot aircraft, or ride a surfboard.
We are very complex adaptive learning systems that can internalize and automate a huge range of activities that would result in disaster if the feedbacks fall out of range. it’s a generalizeable ability.
Humans can hundred of thousand years of evolution to get walking right, I don’t consider it to be that exiting as something like operating machinery like cars, bikes and airplaines.
But do we come with pre-programmed methods for moving around—or do we just pick it up as we go along? I noticed that my two children used very different methods for moving around as babies. My daughter sat on her butt and pushed herself around. My son somehow jumped around on his knees. Both methods were surprisingly effective. There’s supposedly a “crawling stage” in development but neither of my kids did any crawling to speak of. I guess this isn’t as straightforwardly innate as one might think. Maybe Esther Thelen had it right.
Interesting point. I read at some point that primates, humans included could not swim “instinctively” but had to learn. Or if they didn’t learn would drown if they couldn’t walk out of the water. In contrast, most other animals I read are instinctive swimmers.
Then I looked at my dog in a pool. What he does is try to run while he is in the pool. The effect is he gets enough lift to keep his efficient-for-swimming head on a neck above body above water, and he gets forward thrust. My insight/guess was that it wasn’t so much that someone or something put something in the dog to make him swim “instinctively,” but that dog-ancestors who’s natural gaits did not translate to swimming when tried in water survived sufficiently less often that the marketplace which is evolution abandoned that product line. I wondered about primates: were we just better at not falling in water so often that having a gait that worked to get us out just wasn’t as important? Was our adaptability such that primates that grew up around water learned enough swimming to get by and primates who weren’t around water had insufficient value in swimming? Were the costs of finding a “natural” gait that worked in water for the primate just too much higher than finding gaits that worked for our four-legged friends?
So I think we are pre-programmed to walk, to talk, to run, not by some neurologic programming, but by the shapes and attachments of our muscles and bones. There are just so many possible solutions that yield useful motions, with walking and running in the standard way really quite good uses of the facilities available. But we see often, more with talking that walking, someone who learns things slightly non-optimally and if caught early is untrained and then retrained.
I think a lot of our “instinct” for walking and probably other physical things we do is stored in our muscles and bones, and almost invariably, our adaptive neural systems find them in there.
But do we come with pre-programmed methods for moving around—or do we just pick it up as we go along?
I think that question is deeper than it seems at first glance.
Given that we can learn things like operating cars just as well as walking it doesn’t seem to be the case that evolution focused on giving us pre-programmed methods for moving around.
If we don’t come with pre-programmed methods for moving around, the question is why didn’t evolution give us those methods? Maybe not giving a species pre-programmed methods for dealing with some common problems gave us creativity. It might be the seed of our human intelligence.
cars, bikes and airplaines aren’t alien technology that we mysteriously happen to be able to operate. We designed them specifically to fit our physical and mental skills.
I find something like the change in time perception that we go through when driving on a highway pretty remarkable.
When going from highway driving to normal road driving things seem very slow.
Given that there are no cases in prehistory where a human traveled 100 km/h it’s pretty interesting that we have useful adaptive behavior that triggers in those situations.
Occasionally I’ll take a video of myself driving on my phone or google glass and whenever I look at it I feel like “holy shit that’s fast” even though it’s usually city driving at 25-30 miles an hour.
The evolution of our bodies (from the shape of our bones to the particular sensitivities of our inner ears) such that the equilibrium most-efficient form of locomotion that we perfect by learning by age two is walking on two legs is different from the process by which an individual with that body actually learns to do it. Yes we are wired such that learning the repetitive limb-swinging walking-type of motion is easy, with some species-specific tweaks in tendencies, but all vertebrates are wired like that.
Yes, horses learn to walk in minutes but they have four legs, that’s quite a bit easier to figure out. They also aren’t born at our massive level of neurological incompleteness.
Humans can walk. Pretty crazy huh? Constantly balancing tens of kilograms on top of constantly shifting upside-down pendulums, one (or okay, a few) misstep(s) from death (depending on where you are walking). We can even learn to do so on stilts, or ride bikes, or pilot aircraft, or ride a surfboard.
We are very complex adaptive learning systems that can internalize and automate a huge range of activities that would result in disaster if the feedbacks fall out of range. it’s a generalizeable ability.
Humans can hundred of thousand years of evolution to get walking right, I don’t consider it to be that exiting as something like operating machinery like cars, bikes and airplaines.
But do we come with pre-programmed methods for moving around—or do we just pick it up as we go along? I noticed that my two children used very different methods for moving around as babies. My daughter sat on her butt and pushed herself around. My son somehow jumped around on his knees. Both methods were surprisingly effective. There’s supposedly a “crawling stage” in development but neither of my kids did any crawling to speak of. I guess this isn’t as straightforwardly innate as one might think. Maybe Esther Thelen had it right.
Interesting point. I read at some point that primates, humans included could not swim “instinctively” but had to learn. Or if they didn’t learn would drown if they couldn’t walk out of the water. In contrast, most other animals I read are instinctive swimmers.
Then I looked at my dog in a pool. What he does is try to run while he is in the pool. The effect is he gets enough lift to keep his efficient-for-swimming head on a neck above body above water, and he gets forward thrust. My insight/guess was that it wasn’t so much that someone or something put something in the dog to make him swim “instinctively,” but that dog-ancestors who’s natural gaits did not translate to swimming when tried in water survived sufficiently less often that the marketplace which is evolution abandoned that product line. I wondered about primates: were we just better at not falling in water so often that having a gait that worked to get us out just wasn’t as important? Was our adaptability such that primates that grew up around water learned enough swimming to get by and primates who weren’t around water had insufficient value in swimming? Were the costs of finding a “natural” gait that worked in water for the primate just too much higher than finding gaits that worked for our four-legged friends?
So I think we are pre-programmed to walk, to talk, to run, not by some neurologic programming, but by the shapes and attachments of our muscles and bones. There are just so many possible solutions that yield useful motions, with walking and running in the standard way really quite good uses of the facilities available. But we see often, more with talking that walking, someone who learns things slightly non-optimally and if caught early is untrained and then retrained.
I think a lot of our “instinct” for walking and probably other physical things we do is stored in our muscles and bones, and almost invariably, our adaptive neural systems find them in there.
Apparently infants know how to kind of swim for the first few months.
I think that question is deeper than it seems at first glance.
Given that we can learn things like operating cars just as well as walking it doesn’t seem to be the case that evolution focused on giving us pre-programmed methods for moving around.
If we don’t come with pre-programmed methods for moving around, the question is why didn’t evolution give us those methods? Maybe not giving a species pre-programmed methods for dealing with some common problems gave us creativity. It might be the seed of our human intelligence.
cars, bikes and airplaines aren’t alien technology that we mysteriously happen to be able to operate. We designed them specifically to fit our physical and mental skills.
I find something like the change in time perception that we go through when driving on a highway pretty remarkable. When going from highway driving to normal road driving things seem very slow.
Given that there are no cases in prehistory where a human traveled 100 km/h it’s pretty interesting that we have useful adaptive behavior that triggers in those situations.
Occasionally I’ll take a video of myself driving on my phone or google glass and whenever I look at it I feel like “holy shit that’s fast” even though it’s usually city driving at 25-30 miles an hour.
The evolution of our bodies (from the shape of our bones to the particular sensitivities of our inner ears) such that the equilibrium most-efficient form of locomotion that we perfect by learning by age two is walking on two legs is different from the process by which an individual with that body actually learns to do it. Yes we are wired such that learning the repetitive limb-swinging walking-type of motion is easy, with some species-specific tweaks in tendencies, but all vertebrates are wired like that.
Yes, horses learn to walk in minutes but they have four legs, that’s quite a bit easier to figure out. They also aren’t born at our massive level of neurological incompleteness.