1) evolution is not conducive to producing knowledge (while it is good at finding behaviors), because the evolutionary advantage of any knowledge that's not immediately actionable (i.e. behaviors) is small
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Knowledge cannot be passed on via your DNA to our descendants (obviously), so any innate knowledge about the world found in our brains must have been found through natural evolution. But...
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2) as brains change, so does the world; evolutionary scales (# of trials required by evolution as a search process) are too long to stumble upon adequate knowledge for the current state of world, so such knowledge would have to be limited to long-term invariants (which are few)
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3) there just isn't a lot of storage space in the part of your DNA that's related to your brain; it's a few megabytes, so you couldn't store much in terms of pre-trained connectome
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A pre-trained connectome developed by evolution is how insects work, but not humans; that approach is extremely behavior-centric and pretty limited in what sort of knowledge it can produce. The innate part of human cognition is mostly about how to learn -- not knowledge itself.
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I agree with the motivation of this thread, but just to nitpick on the obvious point about DNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism pic.twitter.com/ZKhxdBooGq
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Epigenetics doesn't escape this, it's still genetically controlled. They're like runtime conditional flags which jump and or stay a state machine into a state. Outside plants and even there it's not without controversy, little evidence of any heritable or passed information
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your first assumption is false because the DNA you pass down changes over the course of your lifetime, and various events in your life can “trigger” new DNA to be constructed https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080624174849.htm …
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It's trivial to observe that DNA sequences "change over the course of your lifetime"; that's the definition of mutation. The linked article is referring to chromatin changes that modulate gene expression "above" the level of the DNA sequence itself (hence EPI-genetic).
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If memories are indeed stored at the synaptic cleft, shouldn't it be possible to encode that state into DNA? Future descendents would have this innate knowledge based on the given prior.
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