It does make sense but this is why evolutionary biology debates about specific features or organisms are so fruitless - a well known landmine within the field. You can come up with a “just so” story to explain just about any evolutionary path.
If you treat it as a hypothesis to be tested, I don't see a problem - I think any way to come up with hypotheses is valid, as long as you're not repeating already investigated paths without new evidence.
On the other hand, treating a story as "true", only because it sounds somewhat compelling and logically consistent is a trap. This is how you get dogmatism and fringe stuff.
You’re not an evolutionary biologist so you probably don’t even know what it means to formulate or test a hypothesis in that field (I have only a peripheral involvement in that field and even I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess because bioinformatics is complicated and full of deadly traps). What are you going to do with it beyond use it as a speculative just so story?
And hey, there’s nothing wrong with doing that on an internet forum, as long as you’re aware just how little predictive value there is. The closest equivalent I can think of is all those fantastical sea monsters and land masses cartographers used to draw in old maps instead of just saying “I don’t know.” As long as no explorer ever ventured there, they could come up with any story they wanted to.
I can just try to explain what part of this I'd find valuable to research.
All that speculation - mine's, GP's, OP's - hinges on one assumption: That something like hereditary visual detectors in the brain exist.
I.e. that there are structures in the brain that have "weights" for large eyes, or cat features or spider features, etc etc - and that those weights are not learned by the individual, but are somehow "hardcoded" and passed down the germ line - which would allow them to be "learned" through evolution of the species.
As a programmer and with my hobbyist understanding of molecular biology, I'd see this as a pretty remarkable hypothesis. Right now, I don't see how this could possibly work: The brain and even the eyes of every person are different, so how could such a detector be "reconstructed" on a cellular level for an individual who has never seen a spider?
It would also raise interesting follow-up questions, both if it were confirmed or disproven:
If it were confirmed, does this mean there are encoded bits of visual information in the DNA? Could we decode them somehow and get "photographs" from prehistoric or even pre-human times? (Or well, less photographs and more something like the "eigenfaces" of face detectors) Are there more such hardwired circuits we didn't know yet? Are there similar circuits for other senses or for higher-level areas in the brain?
On the other hand, if it were disproven, we'd have to rethink situations where we take the existence of such hardwired stimuli almost for granted, like in sexual imagery.
The cat stuff itself has no predictive value, but it points into directions that could deliver it.
We have no idea how that information is transmitted from generation to generation but we have enough animal behavior research to know that many animals instinctually identify visual cues like predators pretty much from the moment they are born. We also have decent evidence that the inheritance may not be entirely genetic in origin, because nearly identical populations in different locales may have wildly different behaviors (like the animals in the Galapagos islands, who aren’t afraid of humans because they’ve had no predators).
The three main candidates for how this information is transmitted are: genetics, epigenetics, and embryonic development. The latter two fields are still in their infancy but that leaves more room for just so stories.
Always beware of anyone using evolutionary biology to make an argument about the development of species.
