How Did Instinct Become Embedded From Evolution?

[jimmydasaint]

These are questions where I have struggled to find answers.

How did instinct arise?

How did it become "embedded" in species of animals?

Are the changes epigenetic and passed on in subtle base modifications (e.g. methylation)?

Do instincts change?

The Great  monarch butterfly seems to use the sun to guide itself huge distances.  I wonder if the amount of sunlight is a cue that then allows instinct to fly to "kick in"?

Quote

We identified that the input cues depend entirely on the Sun,” explained Prof Shlizerman.

“One is the horizontal position of the Sun and the other is keeping the time of day.

“This gives [the insects] an internal Sun compass for travelling southerly throughout the day.”

Great monarch butterfly

[mistermack]

On 11/7/2018 at 9:16 PM, jimmydasaint said:

How did instinct arise?

As soon as animals evolved movement, the potential was there for instinct to improve survivability. Non random movement could help find food, and anything non-random was instinctive. So I think it goes right back to the the first non-random movement of animals, after the split from plants and fungi, 1,500 million years ago. Movement could have been random for a long or short time after that. I don't know how it would be possible to find out. 

 

On 11/7/2018 at 9:16 PM, jimmydasaint said:

How did it become "embedded" in species of animals?

Like any other characteristic. In the genes. 

 

On 11/7/2018 at 9:16 PM, jimmydasaint said:

Are the changes epigenetic and passed on in subtle base modifications (e.g. methylation)?

I don't think it's likely, although I guess it's possible in some cases.

 

On 11/7/2018 at 9:16 PM, jimmydasaint said:

Do instincts change?

The Great  monarch butterfly seems to use the sun to guide itself huge distances.  I wonder if the amount of sunlight is a cue that then allows instinct to fly to "kick in"?

The Monarch is a very weird case, if I remember rightly. From memory, it takes several generations to fly north, turn around and fly south again. So how it manages to do that by instinct would probably be a one-off, and would need special study to find the answer.

Or maybe it's not unique in that, but it's the only one I've heard of.

[Francis]

There is no end to questions about how evolution produced this and produced that, but none of the answers can be verified, so I find discussions arising from such questions to be thoroughly pointless, innane and boring.   Hypotheses that promise nothing but a dead-end (or more questions) just aren't my cup of tea.  

[mistermack]

Yes, there ought to be a rule that you can leave those discussions, and just take part in the ones that interest you.

[Strange]

4 hours ago, Francis said:

There is no end to questions about how evolution produced this and produced that, but none of the answers can be verified

Yep. We can never know how antibiotic resistance evolved. It could have been caused by rap music. Or Catholicism. Or sunspots. Anything really. How could we ever know.

[Francis]

14 hours ago, Strange said:

Yep. We can never know how antibiotic resistance evolved. It could have been caused by rap music. Or Catholicism. Or sunspots. Anything really. How could we ever know.

Er, antibiotic resistance can be studied and tested using observed, repeatable experiments.  It's called empirical science.  On the other hand, an hypothesis about how feathers evolved, for example, is just pie-in-the-sky gibberish - nothing can be tested or learnt and no benefit can be gained.  

[iNow]

Ignoring for a moment the laughable attempts to derail this thread with evolution denial, let me return to the OP.

On 11/7/2018 at 3:16 PM, jimmydasaint said:

How did instinct arise?

How did it become "embedded" in species of animals?

How is instinct being defined for this discussion?

[zapatos]

On 11/11/2018 at 4:10 AM, Francis said:

There is no end to questions about how evolution produced this and produced that, but none of the answers can be verified, so I find discussions arising from such questions to be thoroughly pointless, innane and boring.   Hypotheses that promise nothing but a dead-end (or more questions) just aren't my cup of tea.  

Yet here you are, a fly in the ointment. Might I suggest that if you find these discussions pointless, inane, boring, and not your cup of tea, that you avoid these types of discussions? That is how most people deal with those things they dislike.

[Phi for All]

5 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Yet here you are, a fly in the ointment. Might I suggest that if you find these discussions pointless, inane, boring, and not your cup of tea, that you avoid these types of discussions? That is how most people deal with those things they dislike.

Excellent observation, and one most should be able to identify with. For years I tuned out when my wife and her sister talked about fabric, because it wasn't my cuppa. One day something they said sparked my interest. I started paying attention, and now I'm not so ignorant about fabric anymore. I removed a barrier that was stifling my ongoing education.

[StringJunky]

4 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Excellent observation, and one most should be able to identify with. For years I tuned out when my wife and her sister talked about fabric, because it wasn't my cuppa. One day something they said sparked my interest. I started paying attention, and now I'm not so ignorant about fabric anymore. I removed a barrier that was stifling my ongoing education.

Some people need to learn to exercise self-censorship; see what you want to see and ignore the rest. "But I can''t because it's there!"  

[Moontanman]

10 hours ago, Francis said:

Er, antibiotic resistance can be studied and tested using observed, repeatable experiments.  It's called empirical science.  On the other hand, an hypothesis about how feathers evolved, for example, is just pie-in-the-sky gibberish - nothing can be tested or learnt and no benefit can be gained.  

I think there is some pretty good speculations about the origin of feathers.

http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/feather_evolution.htm

[MonDie]

Speculation! Speculation!

I think homeostatic processes came first.  An instinctual behavior involves a response to a stimulus that continues until completion, but homeostatic responses do not continue until completion.  Instead, the homeostatic responses controlled by our hindbrain are cyclic: they turn on and off with the presence or absence of certain environmental conditions.  At some point the stimulus conditions narrowed to a particular event, and the response was shaped (see shaping) into a highly refined sequence of responses that continue until completion.

[QuantumT]

To win in the game of existing, you need to survive and make offspring. Your offspring needs to do the same.

So it's quite simple. If you have a quirk, that makes you avoid early death, you succeed. Instincts are those quirks.