Example 1:
"Immediately after the delivery, a cow will get up and begin to call a low
and short "moo" to her calf to encourage it to get moving. She will
vigorously lick it all over to clean the membranes off it and this also puts
her scent all over it. Licking it dries the calf nearly as well as rubbing
a towel all over it! A good mama cow will have her calf trying to stand
within a few minutes of birth. By licking it all over, she gets the
circulation going and the calf starts to recognize her calls as well.
Nature is an amazing thing, as the wobbly calf will immediately head toward
the cow looking for milk." (from a blogger from Kansas)
We may wonder how the calf knows to stand up and look
for milk, clearly an innate skill. As analogy, we can think
of the calf as carrying an instruction manual in genes and then in the head.
We can imagine it as being somewhat like a cookbook - 'The Joy of Walking
and Feeding'.
Next, we note the cow licking and mooing to the calf. We
can see this as skills by the cow that are complementary to the standing,
walking, and feeding skills of the calf. The mooing and licking send
information to the calf that may play a role in invoking the standing, walking, and
feeding skills.
Example 2:
The Moose bulls will seek several females to mate with each season starting
around September and October. Fighting for a mate can be over very quickly
if one adult male is trying to compete with a younger bull as the younger
one will usually retreat, but two grown males fighting can turn into a very
ferocious and violent battle. (Photographer: Donna Dewhurst)
The mating competition
between the males does not directly benefit the males, they would have
been better off feeding instead of risking injury. The competition also does
not benefit the female, since it hardly matters to her pregnancy which male
impregnated her. Individual,
We can see mating rituals and competitions as part of a group-level
skill-set, which includes gender-based skills such as differentiating
between males and females and fighting (for males).
These complementary skills appear to benefit the group more than the
individuals involved by increasing the frequency of passing genes from the
'better' male to the next generation.
Example 3:
The Italian hang-glider pilot Angelo d'Arrigo noted that the flight of a
non-motorised hang-glider is very
similar to the flight patterns of migratory birds: both use updrafts of hot
air (thermal currents) to gain altitude which then permits soaring flight
over distance.
Birds which are hatched in captivity have no mentor birds to teach them their
traditional migratory routes. D'Arrigo had one solution to this problem. The
chicks hatched under the wing of his glider, and imprinted on him.
Subsequently, he taught the fledglings to fly and to hunt. The young birds
followed him not only on the ground (imprinting - as with Lorenz) but also
in the air as
he took the path of various migratory routes. He flew across the Sahara and
over the Mediterranean Sea to Sicily with eagles, from Siberia to Iran
(5,500 km) with a flock of Siberian cranes, and over Mount Everest with
Nepalese eagles. In 2006, he worked with a condor in South America.
(Photo: Wikipedia - Christian Moullec flying with geese in Dahlem, Germany)
This seems to illustrate that learned skills can be passed from one generation to
the next.
For all of the examples above we need to show that the skills are 'improved' through variation and selection, i.e. that evolutionary processes apply. We propose that innate mimicry and apprenticeship can function analogously to genetic evolution, i.e. copy and optimize learned skills.
We also speculate that the evolution of human language is an extension of the evolution of inter-skill communication as illustrated in the three examples above.