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Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk. It's interesting seeing what come
by Animats 1y ago
Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not.
Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial.
Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
- somenameforme 1y agoOne of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up. But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
- dotancohen 1y agoIf we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
- lukan 1y agoThe moon has very little gravity bringing extra problems, but maybe Mars would have the right gravity to enable Babies walk from the beginning?
- jonplackett 1y agoIf you enjoy this kind of speculating you might like the Expanse series of books and TV shows. They have humans growing up on Mars, the asteroid belt, moons. Anyone who doesn’t grow up on earth cannot go there without extreme gravity training.
- lukan 1y agoI did enjoy the first season of the series, but then was turned off by some story arcs, but maybe I will give it a try again. Are the books more consistent?
- wafflemaker 1y agoMuch more consistent. Books are huge, hence the need to shorten them. But IMHO, series have done a really good job overall. Given how nearly impossible it is to simulate micro-gravity, or other advanced technology.
- dotancohen 1y agoAlso, in season three or four suddenly everybody started cursing all the time. The series just wasn't fun to watch anymore.
- jazzypants 1y agoI legitimately did not notice this and I cannot imagine it affecting my enjoyment of a show.
- le-mark 1y agoThat series strived for realism in that regard, and in using magnetic boots to work in zero gravity; which was admirable. That made the things that were not realistic stand out even more imo. The (unfortunately named) Epstein drive, a drive that consumes very little mass under constant acceleration allows for relativistic speeds in very little time (weeks). Their ships were flying from one side of the solar system to the other in weeks, but they couldn’t make interstellar flights? Also the effects of cosmic rays and hard radiation on reproduction makes the disaffected belter population seem impossible. That’s all fine of course, just inconsistent imo. Shohreh Aghdashloo performance was a real treat though!
- jonplackett 1y agoWalking would probably suck on such a planet and we would see babies bounding long distances instead!
- stonemetal 1y agoIf gravity were lower we would have evolved differently, walking would have adapted too. On the other hand babies probably wouldn't be able to walk either. Being mobile, defenseless, and not having "runaway!" as the default defense mechanism (like horses) is an evolutionary dead end.
- rowanG077 1y agoSure we might have evolved differently. But that doesn't mean that the human body doesn't work better at sustained 0.8G or 1.2G or whatever.
- mikkupikku 1y agoProblem is we don't have any good data about which gravitational accelerations would be suitable for long term health. We have 1g as our baseline, and we know that months in 0g messes you up and longer is a bad idea. We don't know anything about the long-term effects of living in Mars or Lunar gravity though. It could be studied using von Braun stations, but nobody has done it.
- elric 1y agoIIRC they also have a swimming/diving instinct/reflex, which they similarly seem to unlearn after a while.
- itsalwaysgood 1y agoInfants will also grip anything you place in their hands.
- lrivers 1y agoThey will also grab with their toes. Place your finger across their toes between the foot and the sweet little toesies and they will grip your finger pretty hard. We monkey
- lordnacho 1y agoOne of my kids could stand on the day she was born. She seemed super strong, so while I held her I just took my hands away, and she stood there and stared at the rest of the family. Lasted a good 10 seconds, then I thought it was enough.
- walthamstow 1y agoMy boy is 2mo old and he could lock his legs with extreme strength in the first few days. I was very impressed, but my wife told me to stop letting his legs hold any weight. Apparently his uncle was walking at 9mo but his body wasn't ready and he gave himself a hernia.
- altcognito 1y agoBabies have strong legs in order to push themselves out of the womb
- altcognito 11mo agoThis was indeed a wrong statement - I was pretty sure I had read something along these lines, but I checked it out after writing this and no, it's not the case.
- phkahler 1y ago>> One of my kids could stand on the day she was born. She seemed super strong, so while I held her I just took my hands away, and she stood there and stared at the rest of the family. Lasted a good 10 seconds, then I thought it was enough. Probably a good experience. However, at that age it may have been a setback if the kid fell down and got hurt because they weren't strong or coordinated enough. The experience (good or bad) of doing something for the first time can be very influential on future behavior.
- iambateman 1y agoAccording to my wife, who is an OT, children are born with a reflex that straightens their legs and which sounds similar to what you saw. She said they lose the reflex during their first year, and then develop the actual skill of standing separately. It was fun to watch with our kids, too!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- alfonsodev 1y agois it true that it's a tradeoff ? the "more precocial" the less flexibility to learn new things ? on the contrary knowing less equals less assumptions, which needs more flexibility in exchange. Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?
- idiotsecant 1y agoIt must be a tradeoff. I don't have any proof, but my thinking is that we pay an extraordinary price in terms of resources required to keep human babies safe for years before they can keep themselves safe. That is a strong selection pressure on everyone involved. The fact that it still happens means it must somehow be worth it.
- adrianN 1y agoHumans are born quite prematurely so that the head fits through the birth canal.
- BananaaRepublik 1y agoNaturally, I'm a dev. Could it be something to do with limited genetic storage being dedicated to software instead of coding for hardware capabilities? In my limited knowledge, increasing DNA size comes at a maintainance cost(transcription, replication etc), so there's a soft upper bound.
- foofoo12 1y ago> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born That trade has an extreme genetic advantage when other animals see you as their succulent mains on the a la carte exotic wildlife menu.
- _heimdall 1y ago> They are born knowing how to walk. I'm not aware of any way we can know this. We do know that those species are born with the physical ability to walk within the first few hours after birth. How could we distinguish between whether they were born with the knowledge of how to walk as opposed to them learning it quickly since their body can physically do it?
- bob1029 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_pattern_generator#Locomotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_pattern_generator#Loco...
- throw-qqqqq 1y agoThis was very interesting to read! TIL thank you
- csomar 1y agoHow about running from snakes for their lives right after they hatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4CQj-TCbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4CQj-TCbA
- chrisweekly 1y agothat was amazing, thanks for sharing!
- tim333 1y agoRemarkable really that they can jump around the rocks like that just after hatching. (jump bit https://youtu.be/el4CQj-TCbA?t=217 https://youtu.be/el4CQj-TCbA?t=217)
- _heimdall 1y agoAre you proposing that as an example that animals (and humans) seem to be born with natural instincts for survival or that we know they are born with that information? If the latter, how do you propose we know that as a fact? Presumably we would really need to know how that information is passed down to the child and how it knows how to interpret it. To my best understanding, we effectively stop at DNA seeming to be a complex set of instructions for how to make the animal. We don't know if or how it might encode knowledge, or if something else entirely is at play to make those instincts known to the newborn.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> They are born knowing how to walk. This is unlikely to be a good way to think about them. The norm is for animals to be born knowing how to move. Whether they actually can move shortly after birth is more of a question of muscle development than knowledge. For example, when birds are held immobile until they're old enough to fly, they fly normally.
- ekidd 1y ago> It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known as St Johns Water Dogs. They have multiple aquatic adaptations: the "otter tail", oily fur, and webbed feet. (Some of these are shared with other water-oriented breeds.) Some lines of Labradors, especially the "bench" or English dogs, normally retain this full suite of water adaptations. But the wild thing about these particular Labradors is that they love to swim, and that most of them are born knowing how to swim very well. But they don't know that they know how to swim. So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives. The near-instant transformation from "fascinated by water and fearing it" to "hey I can swim and this is the absolute best thing ever" is remarkable to watch, though not recommended. I remember another Lab, who'd been afraid to go swimming, who one day impulsively bolted for the water, took an impressive leap off a rock, and (from his reaction) apparently realized in mid-air that he had no idea what he was going to do next. Once he hit the water, he was fortunately fine, to the great relief of his owner. CAUTION: This behavior pattern is apparently NOT universal in Labs. Owners of "field" or American Labs seem to have much better thought-out protocols for introducing hunting dogs to water, and failure to follow these protocols may result in bad experiences, dogs that fear water, and actual danger to dogs. So please consult an expert.
- devmor 1y ago> So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives. Interesting, I didn’t know this was a common phenomenon! It describes exactly what happened with my childhood lab - my family would go swimming at the river and he would whine and fuss at the shore, until one day he wanted to play with another dog that was in the water so badly that he just jumped in, and was swimming around like he’d been doing it his whole life already.
- mrtksn 1y agoIIRC Andrej Karpathy in a recent talk made a point that reading a book isn't like memorizing the book, it's more like prompting the brain with the book. So maybe this concept of being ready to go at birth isn't about the animals ability to start doing things but just a way of upbringing regardless of how ready the animal is to function. Maybe pigs just start prompting early. AFAIK human babies can swim right out of the womb. In other words, maybe the distinction between precocial and non-precocial(I don't know if there's a word for that) animals isn't that clear?
- phi-go 1y agoI don't think babies can swim but they know not to try and breathe in water. Which is probably what you meant.
- mrtksn 1y agoI think it's called "diving reflex", not very sure about it all but AFAIK babies can learn to swim properly quite early which makes me think that humans too come with a lot of "ready to go" features but maybe need some prompting to surface
- ghaff 1y agoKids (and even adults) definitely don't know how to swim off the bat though I have no doubt they could be taught earlier than many are. There's a reason some universities have a requirement to take swimming physical education absent a demonstrate ability to swim.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- guerrilla 1y ago> precocial I thought you misspelled presocial, but precoial is etymologically related to precocious, both originally meaning early-maturing or something along those lines.
- shevy-java 1y ago> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk. Early young borns that could walk, like a baby giraffe or baby rhino, often fall down or get exhausted quickly initially; tons of youtube videos show that. Humans are slow learners here, but I would not call these other animals as "born knowing how to walk" if their initial steps are so insecure. Their body structure is different though - a newborn human is basically pretty crap-built. A baby deer kind of is built differently on birth and that also makes sense if you are threatened by other predator animals like wolves or bears or lions.
- masfuerte 11mo agoThere's a distinction between having the knowledge and having the physical fitness. When someone is confined to a hospital bed for months they find that they get exhausted very quickly when they next try walking. It doesn't mean they've forgotten how.
- rglover 1y agoI have an anecdote that sounds like it fits this... The house I used to live in had a ton of blue tailed skinks around it. You could always spot a baby by its size and brightness of the blue in its tail (juveniles have a brighter hue, adults are more brown). To avoid birds, the skinks would do this shimmy under the siding of the house just across from my back porch. What surprised me is that even the babies, maybe a few days old, all knew how to do the siding shimmy. Young, old, didn't matter, you could tell they just knew how (and why) to do it.
- iambateman 1y agoOne of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.” A three day old horse can walk. A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already. But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.
- lupire 1y agoIt really is strange how slowly humans grow to full size, and then stop. Other animals grow in under a year or two, or never stop growing until they die. How closely is physical size related to mental maturity? Do other animals mentally mature approximately when they reach full size?
- rsynnott 1y agoI'm not sure it's all _that_ unique. Elephants are physically mature at 15 to 20, say, so not that different to humans. Other apes are also similarish to humans in this.
- retrac 1y agoMany cetaceans show similar dependency on their parents. They're also some of the few species where the females undergo menopause, like humans. (Elephants might have menopause, too.) Perhaps not coincidentally, maternal elders are very important for these species, often helping their children and grandchildren for decades after they are born.
- begueradj 1y agoExample of an animal which keeps growing until it dies ?
- skmurphy 1y agogoldfish, lobster, crocodile, crab, python, shark to name a few. It's referred to as indeterminate growth.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI'm immediately fascinated by what I imagine are core questions explored by this domain. Largely the trade-offs. It's almost like choosing to ship a product with a hard-coded configuration vs. a more complex "discover and self-calibrate" phase. Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming? Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.
- BurningFrog 1y agoIf you're a prey animal being born in open terrain, you need to be able to run at full speed right away.
- kaptainscarlet 1y agoI think all animals are born knowing how to walk, including monkeys and humans. However, that trait only surfaces at a later stage of their development.
- agumonkey 1y agoI wonder at which point in evolution did organisms decide to embed prototypical structures to save time at birth
- whycome 1y agoYou can’t tell me the information and programming for all the is stored in an egg/sperm cell
- emsign 11mo agoYou forgot to mention the most important part: Those animals are the norm, it's us humans who are the outliers! Of course we have remnants of this knowledge and models of the world that formed our ancestors DNA for Millions of yers in us. Our ancestors newborns were as independent as these other animal children. The only difference is that our heads are too big, so we are born prematurely. The term precocial is misleading. We aren't the norm, we are the outliers, human newborn's are not a blank plate, basing your models of intelligence and learning on the assumption we are the best fit for survival in a world is bogus.
- Mars008 11mo ago> They are born knowing how to walk Most animals know how to walk. They have pre-build 'knowledge' and start with it when they get muscles. The main difference is some species develop muscles before they are borne. Others don't, some can't even see. But as soon as they develop they can walk without even seeing how others do it. The same way birds can learn, or be trained to fly without seeing examples. They start flapping both wings in sync, this is pre-build.