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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

> Few things last 100 years. Children's toys seem particularly fickle. Pet rocks, pogo sticks and scooters have all had full boom and bust cycles while the jungle gym — unflashy, workman-like, no fuss — keeps children coming back. Why is that? It may be that the act of swinging and climbing in the jungle gym contains just enough risk...

Or, maybe it is because we are primates and it is in our DNA.

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It's not like those things are mutually exclusive.

Doubtful. DNA only codes for biochemistry, and the biochemistry has nothing to do with swinging or climbing in any obvious way. Besides we share so much of it with every other living thing on earth.

It's likely we developed specialized parts of our brain to be very good at swinging from branches specifically.

We sure as fuck developed specialized parts of our hands…

Our hands are specialized for _grasping_, not for swinging. We grasp things all the time, but we swing very rarely.

Not strong enough. My hands certainly aren't strong enough to grip something and bear my own weight. I'm sure that can be trained, but it doesn't come as naturally for us as it does for brachiating apes.

Grip strength definitely requires training. Most of us leave a lot of performance on the table, as it were.

If DNA didn't allow for code "greater than the sum of its parts" we wouldn't be here.

I dislike the phrase “greater than the sum of its parts”; it doesn’t say much. At best it just means that the Kolmogorov Complexity of a message is hard to measure just by looking at the message.

It can be in our DNA as much as the browser on which you typed your comment is in the bits on your device's storage. That is true regardless of the fact that bits only code for binary 0|1 and 1s and 0s have nothing to do with displaying a DOM, taking user input, and sending it over a network. Equally, the fact that your device storage shares so many bit sequences with other devices does not imply it cannot have its own characteristics due to its own specific sequences.

In any case though, the expression that something is "in one's DNA" is a common metonymy to express that it is the result of inheritable characteristics.

Sorry but this is quite wrong. There ar emany debates to be had about what we are primed withy but various behaviours, preferences, attentional biases, stimuli responses, etc are certainly inborn.

Certainly, but swinging doesn’t appear to be one of them. You could argue that all mammals share the same basic set of rewards, and that one of them is reward for pushing the envelope of physical excellence. There is a wide variety of observable behavior in different mammals that either needs to be explained by a large number of specialized rewards or one very general one.

Humans definitely evolved from a branch of primates to be much more plains bipeds--and then to other things (but I can't debate if the subsequent change and diversification is really evolution or some less major adaptation). Humans have many of the biological features of apes consistent with being comfortable climbing trees although much less optimized at this point.

What do you think prompts and rewards certain behaviors if not biochemistry?

Right, but that biochemistry is not specialized for _swinging from branches_ in particular. We use exactly the same biochemistry for all rewards, from solving puzzles to sex and everything in between.

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