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Study: Ancestors, not practice, help birds learn to fly!

birds learn to fly with a little help from their a

It’s not only humans who take inspirations or inherit habits from their ancestors – the birds too inherit. Though widely known that birds learn to fly just ‘through practice’ and then gradually tune it into a fine skill, a new study has come to repulse the popular belief.

Interestingly, the study finds that latent memories left behind by their ancestors are the guides to their flight secrets, making mastering these skills easy.

The study explains that the genetically specified latent memory for flying has beneficial effects for learning, although it depends on the unusual form of ‘information storage’ in neural networks.

Dr Jim Stone from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Psychology said,

This new theory has its roots in ideas proposed by James Baldwin in 1896, who made the counter-intuitive argument that learning within each generation could guide evolution of innate behavior over future generations. Baldwin was right, but in ways more subtle than he could have imagined because concepts such as artificial neural networks and distributed representations were not known in his time.

Thus, be it nest building or hunting skills, the motor skills are really complex. And, with information being stored this way, evolution can eventually be accelerated by a meticulous marriage of a ‘combination of innate ability’ and ‘learning over many generations’.

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