The generation dies, and all of the accumulated products of within lifetime learning are lost.
This seems obviously false. For animals that do significant learning throughout their lifetimes, it’s standard for exactly the same “providing higher quality ‘training data’ for the next generation...” mechanism to be used.
The distinction isn’t in whether learned knowledge is passed on from generation to generation. It’s in whether the n+1th generation tends to pass on more useful information than the nth generation. When we see this not happening, it’s because the channel is already saturated in that context.
I guess that this is mostly a consequence of our increased ability to represent useful behaviour in ways other than performing the behaviour: I can tell you a story about fighting lions without having to fight lions. (that and generality of intelligence and living in groups).
(presumably unimportant for your overall argument—though I’ve not thought about this :))
This seems obviously false. For animals that do significant learning throughout their lifetimes, it’s standard for exactly the same “providing higher quality ‘training data’ for the next generation...” mechanism to be used.
The distinction isn’t in whether learned knowledge is passed on from generation to generation. It’s in whether the n+1th generation tends to pass on more useful information than the nth generation. When we see this not happening, it’s because the channel is already saturated in that context.
I guess that this is mostly a consequence of our increased ability to represent useful behaviour in ways other than performing the behaviour: I can tell you a story about fighting lions without having to fight lions. (that and generality of intelligence and living in groups).
(presumably unimportant for your overall argument—though I’ve not thought about this :))