It always puzzled me that certain animals are born with abilities or understandings of things they have never experienced.
In: Biology
We don’t fully understand exactly how memories are stored in the brain, nor how exactly something like the formation of an organ (liver, brain) is “encoded” in the DNA, but in theory, the answer to your question is a memory (the instinct) is hard-encoded in the brain of the animal, and all their offspring have DNA to re-build the animal’s neurons / brain to INCLUDE that memory / instinct.
Like, we have portions of the brain and spinal cord that deal with reflexes, emotions, and things like flight or fight response. These would be what I call the “hard coded” brain regions.
It happens gradually over time.
Like, take a group of some animal, we’ll call them weeplings. Due to some quirk of genetics, one doesn’t like the color red, and another doesn’t like the color blue. The weeplings’ predator, the attackcat is orange with red stripes. The first time these two creatures sees the attackcat, one just walks away and the other gets eaten. There’s a chance the survivor’s kids also have a slight aversion to red, and because it’s useful the aversion becomes stronger over generations. Eventually this could become a strong aversion to just the red/orange combination, which means a weekling that doesn’t mind red just as long as it’s not red-on-orange gets to eat red apples without freaking out, so it gets more food as the instinct becomes refined.
Even if these weeklings have never seen an attackcat before, they just don’t like the shape or color of that animal and can’t really explain it.
Animals don’t have an understanding, it’s just something they do. A spider just…they just want to build this web. They’re not doing it for a reason, it’s just… they really want to build that web. Then flies get caught in the web and the spider never really puts 2+2 together, but it doesn’t need to, the instinct works fine enough.
When a behavior provides a distinct survival advantage, then evolution selects for it. Individuals without this behavior get killed before they have time to reproduce. Over time, individuals without the behavior at birth don’t survive as long as those that do and eventually all the remaining individuals have that trait.
if you had 100 sheep and 10 of the sheep were afraid of water, and would not go in it, and 10 were very good swimmers and the other 80 where somewhere in between. If the shepherd had to get those sheep from pasture “A” to pasture “B”, across a small shallow river, at least 10 sheep would not cross. If the shepherd was to lazy, or tired, or weak to help the non-swimmers across they would eventually be eaten by wolves.
In this way, the non-swimming instinct would be eliminated from this group of sheep.
Depends, the simplest way to demonstrate this is by first understanding natural selection. With natural selection organisms that better adapt to their environment are more likely to survive and as a result are more likely to mate, and this have offspring.
There are 2 types of adaptations that allow organisms to survive, physical and behavioral. To imagine a physical adaptation, think of a polar bear. It has white fur, which is convenient because it lives in an all white environment. Thus it has a much easier time blending in with it’s environment. Making it a better hunter and more likely to survive and produce offspring.
Behavioral adaptations are behaviors an organism exhibits that better allow it to survive this increasing it’s likelihood to survive. For example birds that migrate south in the winter. Because northern climates have less availability for food in the winter, a bird that migrates has a higher likelihood of not starving to death and thus more likely to survive and produce offspring.
Instincts are merely behavioral adaptations embedded in the generic material of organisms. Example, you might hear a loud noise and instinctively look in the direction because your instinct is to identify danger. Because that behavior allowed your ancestors a better chance at survival. They simply passed it down to you.
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