A paper airplane can learn to fly on a breeze in being folded. I posit that a fulmar is closer to a paper airplane than to a drone.
There are undoubtedly similar reflexes that assist fulmars in learning to fly quickly, but that doesn't mean that rapid learning isn't also required.
As a baby I fell into a pool and needed to be rescued. I didn’t inhale water, but as generally happens I very much did just sank to the bottom. Babies can be taught to float at around 5 months, but it’s not reflexive.
I can't say what the extent of those swimming reflexes really is, but water births are not unheard of. Besides there's literally countless examples of this sort of thing, most prey animals can walk or even run mere moments after being born, cetaceans and ram ventilator sharks all know how to swim immediately or they would literally drown, insects can fly as soon as they hatch, etc.
Homo Sapience is special in this regard with almost all their firmware broken. Homo Sapience needs to learn hard how to focus their eyes or to hold head or to walk and even how to crawl. Seems like our abilities to learn are linked with brokenness of our innate software, probably it is a double headed causal arrow: our software is broken because we could overcome it with our general abilities to learn, and our general abilities to learn evolved because without them and without working genetic programs for specific forms of behavior we would be doomed.
I can't help but think that autism is the next step at breaking innate software and developing more robust general learning mechanisms.
This allows for more social/environmental impact on development than pure genetics, and we have developed better language and understanding.
There is no physical limit why we can't have both. .. and we don't have datapoints for time to evolve for every trails.
I hate it when biologists talked as if they knew it all
For what it's worth there are also countless animals which start out very helpless, including many birds which are wholly incapable of flight for some time, and for which learning is not always an easy process. The bird in question is closer to an exception than a rule.
Human birth seems strangely difficult. If you’ve never witnessed a live human birth it’s very traumatic with lots and lots of things that can/do go wrong. I can’t think of another mammal that struggles as hard as humans do during birth. It makes me wonder how humans have survived as long as we have.
We're effectively propagating that difficulty and it compounds generationally (imagine your bloodline has unusually large heads...) but we're smart enough to circumvent fate and the net result would appear to be positive.
Much of what humans do approaches the limit of cutting off the nose to spite the face. Is life better than it has ever been, practically speaking, everywhere? With some exception granted to the last couple of years, yes, and even without, probably yes.
I find it rather disturbing to think about. Diversification is really our only long term hope (hedging so to speak) and in many ways we're constantly moving away from that. If we were suddenly space faring colonizers, or if there were another dark age, then that would cease to be true, for better or for worse.
Especially for a mammal with front-facing eyes.
It's interesting to note our peers in this regard. Mice have a two-piece pelvis, and dolphins have no pelvis at all.
Thank you :-)
I think that is a specific cultural view, to assume it is traumatic. I certainly did not think so.
And that human birth is hard, has the evolutionary roots in going bipedal and walking upright as far as I know. Being upright blocks the pelvis, being down, opens it. Apes who go 4 feet, do not struggle (so hard).
Were you the one giving birth?
And certainly quite some women experience it as traumatic, but not all of them.
Either way, I am not sure that watching a couple of births qualifies anyone to say whether birth being "traumatic" is a question of cultural assumption :-)
No, but talking with women who say convincingly, they did not perceive it as traumatic is enough for me to conclude that births are not traumatic by itself. They can be, but I have the suspicion, that is culturally enforced, but that seems to change slowly.
It doesn't flop out of the nest immediately after leaving the egg, though, right? This is more like a 3 year old child learning to ride a bike on the first go (still impressive) than a newborn infant doing so.
Of course there is that bit where control of the muscles also has to align so there is building up of neural pathways that can be also more like getting hardware wired up. Getting it wired up takes longer in humans.