Irradiated rats and dancing bees

Abstract This chapter discusses three examples of evolution equipping animals with problem-specific information to guide their learning (by shaping the space of hypotheses that they are willing to consider). Case one is rats being able to learn that sweet water, but not flashing lights and loud noises, can make them sick. Case two is bees using odor as a signal for food quality and color as a signal for food location. Case three is bees being able to learn the solar ephemeris—the path of the sun across the sky—even if they have been raised only ever seeing the sun in a single portion of the sky. Given these cases of learning mechanisms that are highly tailored to specific kinds of learning elsewhere in the animal kingdom, it’s suggested that the same might be true of humans. Namely, humans come to the language-learning table with specifically linguistic expectations.