I think that has to be part of it, somehow, although I’m agnostic about whether it’s really analogous to “pretraining” an ML model. Whatever evolution was doing

I think that has to be part of it, somehow, although I’m agnostic about whether it’s really analogous to “pretraining” an ML model. Whatever evolution was doing, it managed to give us neural nets that are mostly ready to go out of the box. Especially non-human animals often have short or no training periods.