Helpful to see how a computer scientist approaches such beautifully complex problems as brain development.
Evolution, development, and learning are one process operating across multiple time scales. Evolution compresses the experience of a lineage into the genome over hundreds of millions of years. Development unfolds that compressed record into a network over the course of hours to years. Learning fine-tunes the result within a single life. The genome is where the long experience is banked; development is how it is unfolded; plasticity is the fast correction when the world moves faster than evolution can track. To read the developmental program as an algorithm is to see how experience, at every scale, becomes structure.