Nature stores SKILLS.
As usual, stupidly pondering the crucial importance of STORAGE vs Just-In-Time Desperation.

I hadn't stopped to ask what Nature thinks.

Nature stores nutrition in various ways, mainly as fats. Every species has a different form and place for storage. Some (eg whales and camels) have large specialized storage, some don't have any storage at all, some store fats for the next generation in seeds and eggs. Overall, Nature doesn't think storing nutrition is tremendously important.

Nature believes storing INFORMATION is vastly more important. DNA/RNA is the core of life, in both hardwired genes and semi-variable epigenes. DNA is skill info, not fact info. Each gene tells the developing organism where and when to make specific types of cells, where and when to fold, where and when to stop or delete.

Nervous systems devote most of their space and energy to SKILL storage. 80% of all our neurons are in the cerebellum where they gather, store and revise SKILL information. The parts of the brain that we usually associate with IQ and fact knowledge are much smaller and weaker.

Our immune system is a separate store of INFORMATION, gradually accumulating through life and using induction to generalize from each learned microbe to similar microbes. Needless to say, the muzzles and distancing of the current holocaust are precisely and fiendishly designed to stop the immune system's learning.

Our human technologies, from speech to books to art to computers, mainly store fact knowledge. We didn't have a way of storing SKILL info until motion pictures and videotape came along, and both of these are much less effective than internal experience and apprenticing.

Wildly speculative question: Did earlier civilizations find other ways to store and pass along skills, aside from the obvious drawings and maps? Did some pots and arrowheads and cooking utensils serve as non-verbal self-explanatory templates? Start cutting here, turn the flint here? Fill with water to this line, boil as long as you'd normally boil barley, then add the next ingredient? Some of these stones marked with patterns might fill the bill if we understood them.

Labels: skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 5:58 AM