Are there some heriditary
animal behaviors of the form "do X until Y is true"?
John McCarthy responds to Edge publisher/editor John Brockman's request to futurists to pose "hard-edge" questions that "render visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefine who and what we are."
Many animals have quite substantial hereditary behavior. Moreover, these behaviors are subject to evolution on fairly short time scales, so they probably have straightforward DNA encodings on which mutations can act. Mostly the behaviors seem to be sequences of actions, but perhaps there are some of the form "do X until Y is true".
