Ok here's one to ponder...

I read an article in National Geographic a few weeks ago about a study they did on monkeys in regards to fear.

They raised monkeys in captivity, never exposing them to their natural environment. Then they introduced the monkeys to snakes to see if the monkeys were naturally afraid of snakes. The monkeys were completely unafraid of the snakes.

Then they showed monkeys video of real monkeys in the wild acting afraid of snakes. After seeing the video, the captive monkeys then became afraid of snakes.

They did a similar experiment where they showed the monkeys flowers, then showed the monkeys a video where monkeys were acting afraid of flowers (the video was edited). The monkeys didn't become afraid of flowers after seeing the fake video.

So a while back I wrote a piece called learning from fish in a barrel. Here is the link:
http://www.calfishing.com/archives/7_23_2004.htm

Even though monkeys are obviously a lot smarter than fish, I think that the concept is the same. A fish can see something bad happen to another fish and learn from it. So even though the fish isn't smart to begin with when its born, it can become smart due to a predisposition to fear of certain things. Interesting huh.