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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

> Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen.

I would add a couple of things to that. First, humans (like other animals) have instincts and feelings; even newborns can exhibit varying personality traits as well as fears and desires. It's certainly useful to fear things like spiders, snakes, or abandonment without prior experience.

Second, an important part of experience is inner life - how you personally perceive, feel, and experience things. This may be very different from person to person.

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What really fascinates me is gender based toy preferences at <2 years old. Very consistent that boys like race cars and action figures, even though it's their first exposure.

(I do not participate in culture wars, this fact just straight up fascinates me as a non-masculine gay guy.)

I'd be curious how we know they aren't exposed - 1 year is a long time to see TV shows, TV commercials, toys with pictures of target audience, picture books, etc...

Cars were invented in the early 1900s and the vast majority of human existence was in a world without cars. There cannot be an innate preference for cars, which were a very recent invention.

Toy cars (tiny wheeled carts) date back at least 5000 years, but tools/technology date to the dawn of humanity.

The spinning wheel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel), which creates yarn from threads, existed longer than cars. I doubt you would argue that boys would have a preference for playing with toy versions these wheeled tools, given that women in various Western and Eastern cultures were the main users of these tools.

so you're agreeing with me that any preference seen is probably from exposure and not innate like the studies claim?

> action figures

"No sir! I did not see you playing with your dolls again."

I am also gay, but not overly feminine at all. Just a gentle nerd lmao.

And I think there's the possibility that those signals are there early on in our brains. If not race cars, then it was swords and bows that were lying around and were appealing. We are products of evolution.

But as to OP's insistence that behaviors innate to our brains as not being derivative. I think in order to qualify, it must be a conscious behaviour. And even so, innate behaviours are derivative in that they came in response directly to our environs. Were they not, those traits would not have been selected as a response to environmental pressure.

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