Kind of like how object permanence [0] must be learned by babies, slowly worked into their internal model, even though "things don't usually vanish when they go behind other things" seems like reliably low-hanging fruit for any process (whether evolutionary or meddling demigod) to wire up as instinctual physics knowledge.
Animals like newborn deer fawns are born knowing how to walk, follow their mothers around, and run away from danger, although their legs are weak at first. So this makes me wonder if having to learn object permanence is just one more example of human babies being underdeveloped compared to those of other species of animals.
Alternatively, God made human babies superior in design from birth by giving them increased adaptability. The extra flexibility might require the specific movements to be trained, puts them behind on any specific goal at the start, and over time makes them exceed the innate capabilities of other species over time. By exceed, they might have a higher variety of behaviors or do them better (esp with tech).
In A.I., we see this with hard-coded, assembly FSM’s vs interpreters running high-level code. The former works with high-efficiency out of the box but can’t change behavior or improve much. The latter does nothing until it’s taught the extra knowledge (interpreted codes) which also might have new behaviors (functions). Many game developers switched from hard-coded assembly to interpreted code for AI agents for that reason.
So, it’s not under-developed: it’s a better-developed component with different tradeoffs.
> God made human babies superior in design from birth by giving them increased adaptability.
Holy assumptions batman. Homo sapiens aren't "superior", that's a terrible starting place for a hypothesis. There are plenty of metrics a human will never beat other species. Reaction time is a great starting place.
It's like you're saying "We humans are the smartest in the world. Smarter animals are better than other animals, so we're better than all other animals."
A giraffe may just as well believe "We giraffes have the longest necks in the world. Animals with longer necks are better than others, so we're better than all other animals."
"Intelligence" itself is not well defined anyway. It may as well mean thinking like a human.
The apex predators of the Earth who are in control of it using their brains that nothing else can match. They also regularly contemplate this using their morals, imaginations, and reasoning. Definitely far above the rest.
At least six global mass extinctions suggest to me that you're correct. However, life itself did survive global magma flows, asteroid impacts, etc. With that in mind I'd say the species that rules Earth is probably a single celled organism which lives deep underground and feeds on chemical gradients. You could blast the whole planet apart without life changing a whole lot for that little guy and his brethren.
To me it makes very little sense for object permanence to be learned rather than innate - have a look at the "contradicting evidence" in the article you linked
Kind of like how object permanence [0] must be learned by babies, slowly worked into their internal model, even though "things don't usually vanish when they go behind other things" seems like reliably low-hanging fruit for any process (whether evolutionary or meddling demigod) to wire up as instinctual physics knowledge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence