Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!bingvaxu!sunybcs!dmark
From: dmark@cs.Buffalo.EDU (David Mark)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Transfer of Instincts through Genetics
Message-ID: <4417@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 27 Feb 89 23:54:40 GMT
References: <1681@uswat.UUCP> <2035@tank.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: dmark@sunybcs.UUCP (David Mark)
Distribution: usa
Organization: SUNY/Buffalo Geography
Lines: 63

In article <2035@tank.uchicago.edu> ogil@tank.uchicago.edu (Brian W. Ogilvie) writes:
>In article <1681@uswat.UUCP> timw@zeb.USWest.COM () writes:
>>
>>If we agree that an animal is born with certain instinctive 
>>characteristics (do we agree on this ?, leave homo sapien out
>>of the picture, whole 'nother topic ?), I contend that genetically
>>defined information determining these characteristics ABSOLUTELY
>>MUST be transferred to the offspring. 
>
>More or less, although recombination will affect the specific pattern
>that the offspring receive. Mutation also plays a part, though it is
>not as important in the short run as recombination.
        [some >> lines deleted]

>>So, unless we're talking creationism vs. evolution, instincts are
>>(1) learned and 2) passed on (IMVHO). 
>
>NO! Instincts are passed on but not learned, at least not in the
>usual sense of "learned." If an instinct is truly innate then learning
>has nothing to do with its presence.

Another mechanism, in at least some organisms, is that they are
"hard-wired" to _learn_ certain things from their environments.  I
know of some examples from birds:

young European passerines (song-birds) of some species were demonstrated
     to not inherit star patterns, but apparently inherit a mechanism for
     learning the night sky pattern and point of rotation:
  -  adults in fall orient away from the stars about which the night
     sky appears to rotate, even in a planetarium even when the stars do not
     rotate.
  -  young birds, exposed to a randomly-generated "night sky" in a
     planetarium, or to a sky rotating about Orion's belt, later
     orient to go away from the training rotation point's pattern.

bird song.  Many species sing the standard song of their species if and 
     only if they are exposed to it at a critical period of their
     development.  Usually, they will not learn the "wrong" song in
     this period, but also will not develop the correct one without
     exposure.

birds of the year, for both Starlings and White Storks in Europe, appear
     programmed to migrate a certain distance and direction.  From
     Denmark, storks normally winter in Spain, and starlings in UK.
     Adult and young birds were trapped in autumn in Denmark, and released
     in Poland.  The adults turned up where they were supposed to, but
     the young ended up in Turkey (storks) or France (starlings),
     respectively, the correct distance and direction but the wrong start
     point.  In this case, the instructions were apparently innate,
     but the "map" had to be learned.

Finally, I recently heard, somewwhere, that human babies react to lots
of sounds in their first week or two, but then reduce greatly their
reaction to sounds *not* in the language that they hear, but react
more to the phonemes of the language(s) around them.

A hard-wired procedure for selectively learning only relevant parts
of the sensory environment may be important.

[I can probably find references for the bird stuff if required]

David M. Mark
dmark@cs.buffalo.edu