There are only two types of animals — those which can swim and those which cannot. Why are humans the only creature that has the optional swimming feature they can turn on?
In: Biology
I don’t think this is very true. Dogs, cats, and a lot of other land animals are able to swim. Most of them suck at it compared to animals that live in the water.
Humans don’t have an “optional swimming feature”. We instinctively know how to do a very laborious paddle. When people “learn to swim” it has to do with training them to be better at it. For example, the body is (usually) naturally buoyant, but if you position yourself certain ways in water you still sink. So you learn things like how to float on your back or how to do a backstroke, which is extremely low-energy. Then you learn specific strokes that help you move faster or use less energy. But a completely untrained person is pretty likely to exhaust themselves and drown in a very short time, mostly because biologically speaking we’re not made to live in water so what instincts we have aren’t devoted to efficient swimming.
It’s no more “an optional swimming feature” as we have “an optional driving a car feature”. Our hands and feet and limbs give us a wide range of mobility and we have really good motor control. A lot of other animals are similar and can learn to do weirdo human things. For example, some dogs can skateboard. They weren’t born knowing how to skateboard. They watched people do it and we’ve bred them to try and mimic what humans do. They did it and the humans laughed. We’ve bred them to want to make humans pleased so they learned this was a good thing they should do more.
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