It's akin to us sending a rocket to space and immediately discovering a wormhole. Sure, there's a lot of science about what's out there, but to discover all this in our first few trips to orbit ...
We don't inherit any software, so cognitive function must bootstrap itself from it's underlying structure alone.
Hardware and software, as metaphors applied to biology, I think are better understood as a continuum than a binary, and if we don't inherit any software (is that true?), we at least inherit assembly code.
To stay with the metaphor, DNA could be rather understood as firmware that runs on the cell. What I mean with software is the 'mind' that runs on a collection of cells. Things like language, thoughts and ideas.
There is also a second level of software that runs not on a single mind alone, but collection of minds, to form cliques or a societies. But this is not encoded in genes, but in memes.
I think it's like Chomsky said, that we don't learn this infrastructure for understanding language any more than a bird "learns" their feathers. But I might be losing track of what you're suggesting is software in the metaphor. I think I'm broadly on board with your characterization of DNA, the mind and memes generally though.
> We don't inherit any software
If you say that this is emergent from the "underlying structure alone", doesn't this mean that it would still be "inherited" software (though in this case, maybe we think of it like punch cards).
But then you have things like language or societal customs that are purely 'software'.
A biological example that I like: the neural structures for vision develop almost fully formed from the very beginning. The state of our network at initialization is effectively already functional. I’m not sure to which extent this is true for humans, but it is certainly true for simpler organisms like flies. The way cells achieve this is through some extremely simple growth rules as the structure is being formed for the first time. Different kinds of cells behave almost independently of each other, and it just so happens that the final structure is a perfectly functional eye. I’ve seen animations of this during a conference talk and it was one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen. It truly shows how the complexity of a biological organism is just billions of times any human technology. And at the same time, it’s a beautiful illustration of the lack of intelligent design. It’s like watching a Lego assemble by just shaking the pieces.
An example that might be useful: dragonflies lay their eggs in water. Since a dragonfly has like a 4-bit CPU you might be amazed at how it manages to get all the processing required to identify a body of water from a distance into its tiny mind, and also marvel at what sort of JPEG+++ encoding must be used to convey what water looks like from generation to generation.
But they don't do that at all: instead they have eyes that are sensitive to polarized light. The surface of water polarizes reflected light. So do things like polished gravestones. So dragonflies will lay their eggs on gravestones too.
One I like to ponder is: beavers building damns. Do they have an encoded algorithm that knows that they need to damn the river to have a place to live, by gnawing on trees, carrying them to the right place on the river bed, etc? Nope, certainly they don't have that. Perhaps they have teeth that grow so long that they hurt, motivating the animal to gnaw on something solid to wear them down. The only solid thing they have available is a tree.
How do you claim to know this?
We had one breakthrough a couple of years ago with GPT-3, where we found that neural networks / transformers + scale does wonders. Everything else has been a smooth continuous improvement. Compare today's announcement to Genie-2[1] release less than 1 year ago.
The speed is insane, but not surprising if you put in context on how fast AI is advancing. Again, nothing _new_. Just absurdly fast continuous progress.
[1] - https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...