It always puzzled me that certain animals are born with abilities or understandings of things they have never experienced.
In: Biology
It happens gradually over time.
Like, take a group of some animal, we’ll call them weeplings. Due to some quirk of genetics, one doesn’t like the color red, and another doesn’t like the color blue. The weeplings’ predator, the attackcat is orange with red stripes. The first time these two creatures sees the attackcat, one just walks away and the other gets eaten. There’s a chance the survivor’s kids also have a slight aversion to red, and because it’s useful the aversion becomes stronger over generations. Eventually this could become a strong aversion to just the red/orange combination, which means a weekling that doesn’t mind red just as long as it’s not red-on-orange gets to eat red apples without freaking out, so it gets more food as the instinct becomes refined.
Even if these weeklings have never seen an attackcat before, they just don’t like the shape or color of that animal and can’t really explain it.
Animals don’t have an understanding, it’s just something they do. A spider just…they just want to build this web. They’re not doing it for a reason, it’s just… they really want to build that web. Then flies get caught in the web and the spider never really puts 2+2 together, but it doesn’t need to, the instinct works fine enough.
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