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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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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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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End of conversation
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I think about this line of thinking a lot.
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Respectfully. This seems like a naive view of what is evolving. The universe is clumpy across and within many scales. The “individual” may be the most natural and efficient cluster definition for certain lines of inquiry but I don’t think that epistemology is one of them.
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