*I co-authored this note with ChatGPT, drawing upon a range of related notes and highlights from various readings.* The evolutionary function of learning is to **enhance an organism's ability to adapt, survive, and reproduce in its environment**.^[Seel, 2012] It achieves this by enabling the organism to acquire, process, and apply information and skills that are crucial for navigating the challenges and opportunities it encounters. Learning is particularly vital in environments that are complex and changing. Key points related to the evolutionary function of learning include: **1. Adaptation to Changing Environments:** Learning is pivotal for organisms to adapt to diverse and fluctuating environments. The ability to anticipate, recognize, and rapidly adjust to environmental changes is a significant evolutionary advantage, particularly in dynamic ecosystems.^[Luo, 2021] Learning allows an organism to modify its behavior quickly in real time, which is something that genes cannot do.^[Lee, 2020] **2. Optimization of Resources and Behaviors:** Through learning, organisms can refine their behaviors to exploit resources more efficiently. This optimization ranges from developing sophisticated foraging strategies to choosing advantageous mating practices. Efficient resource utilization enhances an organism's health, longevity, and reproductive success, thereby contributing to its evolutionary fitness.^[Howard-Jones, 2018] **3. Social and Cooperative Advantages:** In social species, such as humans, learning is crucial for navigating complex social structures. Skills like effective communication, understanding social hierarchies, and cooperative breeding strategies are often acquired through learning. These abilities are vital for successful group living, offering benefits such as protection, resource sharing, and improved offspring rearing.^[Howard-Jones, 2018] **4. Cultural Transmission and Evolution:** Learning facilitates the accumulation and transmission of cultural knowledge and practices, significantly impacting survival and reproduction. Cultural evolution, propelled by learning, can outpace genetic evolution, enabling rapid adaptations to new challenges or opportunities.^[Henrich, 2018] **5. Development of Specialized Skills and Knowledge:** Specialized skills and knowledge, acquired through learning, can be crucial in certain environments. Abilities like tool use, navigating complex terrains, or devising hunting strategies enhance an organism's proficiency in securing resources and ensuring survival.^[Henrich, 2018] **6. Enhancement of Problem-Solving and Decision-Making:** Learning improves cognitive functions such as problem-solving and decision-making, essential in various survival and reproductive contexts. An organism that learns from past experiences and applies this knowledge to new situations gains a significant survival advantage. From these perspectives, it's clear that learning is an integral component of an organism's evolutionary toolkit. The evolutionary function of learning lies in its capacity to enable organisms to anticipate future conditions and adapt their behaviors accordingly. This process involves continuous updating of knowledge about internal and external parameters. Learning, thus, emerges as a deep principle of biological design, essential for survival and reproduction in a world rich with uncertainties and opportunities.^[Sterling & Laughlin, 2015] %% ### Outline for ChatGPT To understand the evolutionary function of learning, we need to understand how it solves a reproductive or survival problem for the organism. #### ChatGPT answering the question based on highlights from [[Evolution of the Learning Brain]]: The function of learning, as inferred from the provided excerpts of the book, can be understood in the context of solving reproductive and survival problems in the following ways: 1. **Adaptation to Changing Environments:** Learning allows organisms to adapt to varying environmental conditions. By acquiring and applying new knowledge and skills, organisms can navigate challenges in their surroundings, enhancing their chances of survival. For example, learning to identify and avoid new predators or toxic foods directly impacts an organism's survival. 2. **Optimization of Resources and Behaviors:** Through learning, individuals can optimize their behaviors to better exploit available resources. This includes finding more efficient ways to gather food, select mates, and avoid dangers. Effective resource utilization directly contributes to better health, longevity, and reproductive success. 3. **Social and Cooperative Advantages:** In many species, particularly humans, learning facilitates social interaction and cooperation. Skills like communication, understanding social hierarchies, and cooperative breeding strategies are learned and are crucial for living in complex social structures. These social learning skills contribute to the success of group living, which can offer protection, shared resources, and better rearing of offspring. 4. **Cultural Transmission and Evolution:** Learning is a key mechanism for the transmission of cultural knowledge and practices, which can be crucial for survival and reproduction. Cultural evolution, driven by learning, can occur much faster than genetic evolution, allowing rapid adaptation to new challenges or opportunities. 5. **Development of Specialized Skills and Knowledge:** Learning enables the development of specialized skills and knowledge that can be critical in certain environments. For example, the ability to use tools, navigate complex environments, or develop strategies for hunting or foraging improves an organism's ability to thrive and reproduce. 6. **Navigating Environmental Variability:** Learning allows organisms to cope with the unpredictability and variability of their environment. In fluctuating environments, the ability to learn and adjust behaviors quickly is a significant advantage. 7. **Enhancement of Problem-Solving and Decision-Making:** Learning enhances cognitive abilities like problem-solving and decision-making, which are vital in many survival and reproductive contexts. An organism that can learn from past experiences and apply that knowledge to new situations has a survival advantage. 8. **Facilitating Genetic Fitness and Evolution:** In the long term, learning influences evolutionary processes by contributing to the genetic fitness of individuals. Those who learn effectively are more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass on their genes, which may include predispositions for effective learning. ==In summary, the function of learning is to enhance an organism's ability to adapt, survive, and reproduce in its environment. It achieves this by enabling individuals to acquire, process, and apply information and skills that are crucial for navigating the challenges and opportunities they encounter. Learning is particularly vital in environments that are complex, changing, or where social interactions play a significant role in survival and reproductive success.== #### ChatGPT answering the question based on highlights from [[Principles of Neural Design]] ==The evolutionary function of learning, as discussed in these excerpts, is to enable organisms to better anticipate the future and adapt their behavior to improve their survival and reproductive success. This is achieved through a process of continually updating knowledge about internal and external parameters.== Key points related to the evolutionary function of learning include: 1. **Anticipatory Regulation**: The brain's core task is to regulate the organism's internal milieu, responding to and anticipating needs to satisfy them before they arise. This anticipatory regulation, or allostasis, is a critical aspect of learning, allowing organisms to match response capacity to fluctuations in demand, resolve potential conflicts between organs, and minimize errors. 2. **Adaptation to Environmental Context**: Larger brains, which evolved through natural selection, contain mechanisms essential for survival and are devoid of superfluous elements. These mechanisms include learning, which allows organisms to adjust to their environmental context and improve efficiency under resource constraints. 3. **Efficient Information Processing**: The evolutionary design of the brain and its learning processes is constrained by the need to conserve space, time, and energy. This involves storing new information at the site where it is processed (synapses) and employing a design principle that must obey all other principles of neural design. 4. **Enhancing Survival and Reproductive Success**: Learning enhances an individual's chances of survival and reproduction by improving the group's ability to anticipate and regulate, especially in social contexts like primate societies. 5. **Biological Design Principle**: ==Learning is considered a deep principle of biological design, integral to neural design. All organisms use new information to better anticipate future conditions, making learning a fundamental brain function.== 6. **Constraints of Neural Design**: Learning, like all other neural functions, is subject to constraints of space, time, and energy. It must be efficient, adapting to the real world which is rich in small surprises. 7. **Design of Learning**: The design of learning includes principles like specificity, storing only what is needed, and optimizing teaching signals for the real world. This is essential for the efficient operation of the brain within the constraints of its physical structure and energy requirements. ==In summary, learning is an evolutionary adaptation that allows organisms to efficiently process information, adapt to their environment, and improve their chances of survival and reproduction. It is a core principle of neural design, governed by the constraints of neural function and aimed at maximizing efficiency and effectiveness in response to environmental demands.== #### ChatGPT answering the question based on highlights from Seel: Adaptation and Learning The evolutionary function of learning is to enhance an organism's ability to adapt to its environment, thereby increasing its chances of survival and reproduction. Learning allows animals, including humans, to adjust their behavior based on experiences and environmental changes. This adaptation can manifest in various ways, such as: 1. **Finding Food and Avoiding Danger**: Animals learn to locate and recognize food sources, as well as to avoid potential threats. For instance, certain birds learn where they have stored food, while juvenile salmon learn the odors of their natal streams to navigate during migration. 2. **Social Learning and Communication**: Animals learn from their peers and parents. This includes learning to recognize and respond to specific calls, as in the case of long-tailed tits learning their parents' calls, or juvenile anole lizards using conspecific cueing to assess territory quality. 3. **Predator and Prey Interactions**: Learning plays a role in predator-prey dynamics, with both predators and prey learning strategies to outmaneuver each other. This includes learning to avoid certain foods that might be poisonous, as observed in Norway rats. 4. **Reproductive Strategies**: Animals learn behaviors that enhance mating success. For example, male Japanese quail and blue gourami fish learn cues associated with sexual opportunities. 5. **Habituation and Sensitization**: Animals learn to habituate to non-threatening stimuli, which saves energy and attention for more critical tasks. Conversely, sensitization helps in recognizing and responding to potential dangers. 6. **Adaptability to Environmental Changes**: Learning allows animals to adapt to changing environments within their lifetimes, which is particularly important in environments that are stable within an individual's lifespan but change across generations. 7. **Cost-Benefit Analysis**: The evolutionary advantage of learning also considers the costs associated with learning, such as the energy and time spent learning new behaviors. Learning is favored evolutionarily when it provides a net benefit in terms of survival and reproductive success. In summary, the evolutionary function of learning is to enable organisms to better adapt to their environment and changing conditions, enhancing their survival and reproductive success. This adaptation is achieved through various learning mechanisms and strategies that allow animals to acquire and modify behaviors in response to environmental cues and changes. ### Todo - [ ] Review the literature I've studied so far. What is relevant to this research question? - [ ] Seel (2012): - [ ] Adaptation and Learning (p. 95) - [ ] All forms of learning have an anticipatory component, either implicitly because it adapts the organism for the future or explicitly by supporting predictions of the future. - [ ] Repeated Learning and Cultural Evolution - [ ] Learning and Evolutionary Game Theory (probably not relevant) - [ ] Social learning in animals: - [ ] Broadly speaking, learning can be viewed as an adaptive modification of those neuronal circuits that give rise to behavior. It occurs during the whole lifetime of an individual, but is particularly important during early development. It allows youngsters to fine-tune their behavior to the rapidly changing properties of their local circumstances. Natural selection, acting on genetic variation in a population, is too slow to furnish individual organisms with those adaptations. - [ ] [[Evolution of the Learning Brain]] - [ ] "Prokaryotes, like ==all organisms, **face the challenge that their world can change**.== Even if all else remains the same, just an organism’s habit of harvesting local resources will change its environment. ==At its most basic, **learning can be about detecting these changes**, because it means comparing the world now with the way it was a while ago – which means some memory of the old world must be stored somewhere.==" - [ ] Kirschner: How Learning Happens - [ ] Part I, chapter 4 - [ ] [[Principles of Neural Design]] - [ ] Chapter 1: - [ ] **All organisms use new information to better anticipate the future. Thus, learning is a deep principle of biological design, and therefore of neural design.** Accordingly, the brain continually updates its knowledge of every internal and external parameter—which means that learning is also a brain function. As such, neural learning is subject to the same constraints as all other neural functions. It is a design principle that must obey all the others. - [ ] Ch 3: adapt, match, learn, forget - [ ] Ch 14: learning as design - [ ] **==“Learn” belongs to a broad principle that is actually a continuum: adapt, match, learn, and forget== (chapter 3). This principle is what distinguishes biology from traditional engineering.** - [ ] **Yet for biological design, adaptive responses are the essence. Each fresh experience helps to prepare for a future need.** - [ ] current experience is continually being used to update circuits in order to improve future performance. - [ ] Thus, the brain follows a core principle that serves all biological systems: use current conditions to predict future needs and revise circuits accordingly. - [ ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Learning_and_facultative_adaptations ### Research strategy ### Notes - This is an example of the third of [[Tinbergen's Four Questions]]: What is its adaptive significance? (evolutionary, slice) - Organisms face changing environments. Genes can’t directly optimize for these changes, but they can build organisms that learn and adapt based on the particular environment they find themselves in. That’s a Livewired argument, basically. - The evolutionary "function" of learning is to finish the pre-programmed design to suit its particular environment. - [[Why Adults Lose the Beginner's Mind]] - Perplexity gives the following answer: - The evolutionary purpose of learning is to enable an organism to adapt its behavior during its lifetime without requiring genetic changes across generations, which can provide a fitness advantage [[1]](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/706252) - Learning is a biological adaptation that has evolved through natural selection [[2]](https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/evolution-and-learning) - Evolutionary theory can be applied to human learning through evolutionary developmental psychology [[3]](https://study.com/academy/lesson/evolutionary-theorys-applications-to-learning.html) - Additionally, teaching evolution has the potential to improve student understanding and acceptance of evolutionary concepts [[4]](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-020-00138-4). - Learning evolves in a species where innate knowledge (genetically inherited) is disadvantageous, compared to learning behavior based on information from the environment. - [[The ability to learn allows an organism to adapt to unpredictable aspects of the environment as quickly as possible]] - [[Organisms have evolved to maximize their chances of survival and reproduction]] - Learning is the key to generality – to being able to adapt and thrive in a variety of environments and solve a variety of problems (based on Sam Harris and Eliezer Yudkowsky [podcast](https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/116-ai-racing-toward-brink)). - Seel (2012, p. 247): "Animal learning and intelligence define how non- human beings solve their living problems based on their individual and social experience. **Learning performs adaptive tuning to a changeable environment**, and intelligence helps animals to use their learned experiences in new situations. **Individual adaptive behavior involves different kinds of learning together with innate behavioral patterns**." - Seel (2012, p. 2694): Any organism’s primary purpose is survival. We survive through interacting with the environment, in other words, through adaptation. Successful human adaptation requires meeting several sensory and motor conditions. Sensory conditions comprise an ability to correctly identify and locate objects in the environment. Moreover, an ability to remember what these objects are and where they are located would provide a decisive advantage in adaptation. Therefore, there must have been considerable evolutionary pressure to develop the declarative memory system, which essentially allows sensory-perceptual experience to persist over time. This type of memory is mediated by the medial temporal lobe system, which lies in sensory- perceptual brain regions posterior to the central sulcus. Successful adaptation would also require an ability to benefit from the experience of interacting with the environment, which involves motor function. In other words, adaptation would require benefitting from activity in addition to benefiting from perception. - Luo (2021): - A hallmark of the nervous system is its ability to change in response to experiences through learning. In the preceding chapters, we discussed how the nervous system processes sensory information and organizes motor output. However, the nervous system is much more than a giant sensorimotor circuit. In addition to acquiring sensory information from the environment and generating appropriate responses, animals are constantly learning from their sensory experiences and the consequences of their actions. Such learning processes can cause lasting changes in the nervous system, which retains the learned information we call memory. **Learning enables animals to adapt to a changing environment much more rapidly than the evolutionary process**, and its importance to animals and humans cannot be overstated. Memory endows us with much of our individuality, as we are profoundly shaped by what we remember of our past experiences. - All animals face changing environments. Those that adapt well have greater chances of surviving and producing progeny. Consequently, many types of learning have evolved, each with specific properties, resulting in formation of explicit and implicit memories (Figure 11-3). Psychologists and behavioral biologists have used these properties to categorize learning into different forms. - [[There's a continuum between determining a system's architecture at the start and letting the environment mold the system]] - From when I wrote [[What are the different types of learning?]] - In organisms that have the **capacity for flexible behaviors** that aren't [[There's a continuum between determining a system's architecture at the start and letting the environment mold the system|genetically pre-programmed]] but modifiable by the organism's environment. We can call these behaviors "voluntary." Note that this doesn't mean that the organism has some sort of "free will"; it's just that the organism's behavior is more flexible in the face of changing circumstances. - Such behavioral capacities need to be **tailored to the organism's environment** by some mechanism to ensure the organism's successful [[Evolutionary fitness refers to how many offspring an individual has that grow up to reproduce themselves|adaptation]]. In other words, this mechanism needs to ensure that the organism engages in activities that increase its adaptation and avoids activities that decrease it. - The mechanisms by which conditioning happens are genetically pre-configured. The results that they produce depends on the particular experiences of the organism in its environment. This design is more successful than complete genetic pre-programming if the organism lives in a complex and volatile world. - Connect with [[What are the different types of learning?]]: To what extent do learning types make use of particular learning mechanisms? - See notes under the [[Evolution (Index)]] tag in [[What perspectives on learning do different academic disciplines provide?]] [Kihlstrom et al.](https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jfkihlstrom/IandMLandM.htm): >Traditionally, learning has been defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience. Early investigators -- Pavlov and Thorndike, Watson and Skinner -- construed learning as conditioning -- the formation of associations between environmental stimuli and an organism’s responses to them (Bower & Hilgard, 1981; Schwartz & Reisberg, 1991). However, the cognitive revolution in psychology has led to a reconstrual of learning as a relatively permanent change in _knowledge_ that occurs as a result of experience – declarative and procedural knowledge that the organism will subsequently use for its own purposes in **predicting and controlling environmental events**. Thus, in classical conditioning the organism **forms expectations concerning the likely consequences of events**, and in instrumental conditioning the organism forms expectations concerning the likely consequences of its own behaviors. How this knowledge translates into behavior is another matter. %% --- Topics: - [[Learning (Index)]] - [[Evolution (Index)]] Related notes: - [[What is the evolutionary history of learning?]] - [[Organisms have evolved to maximize their chances of survival and reproduction]] - [[Prediction beats reaction]]