animal instinct

[dstebbins]

Playing the video game Assassin's Creed made me wonder this.

 

Hybernation, reproduction, all those things that are attributed to "animal instinct," things that the animals somehow know, absent the requisite first-hand experience (also, if these things are "instinct," then how come humans, who are just as much animals as dogs and cats, have to be taught how to reproduce or sleep and eat?).

 

I don't doubt for one minute that "instinct" is what the phenomenon is called, but what causes instinct? The guy in Assassin's Creed explained this the way most people explain it: Instinct exists because it just does. But, for scientists, since when was "just because" a suitable answer?

 

Honestly, has there ever even been any research on this, much less conclusive results? If there is, how come I haven't seen it. Such an unexplained phenomenon finally being explored should be front page material.

[Ophiolite]

....how come humans, who are just as much animals as dogs and cats, have to be taught how to reproduce or sleep and eat?

A new born baby, presented with a nipple, will automatically suckle. It does not require to be taught to eat.

 

Children sleep from their first day after birth. They do not require a university diploma, or even a high school certificate to sleep.

 

I cannot speak for the entire planet, but I required no education to engage in the initial stages of the reproductive process!

 

In short, humans are well endowed with instincts. (Your main point requires more thought, at least from me.)

[Mokele]

Oh, there's piles of research, books upon books worth, compiled since Lorenz & Tinbergen began working on animal behavior in the 1930's.

 

A simplified response to your questions: Yes, humans have instincts, and can reproduce, sleep, eat etc without being 'taught'. Our extended infancy and parental dependence may make it *seem* as though we are taught these things, and we probably do learn some finer details (where is best to sleep, what berries are toxic, etc) from parents, but a human is quite capable of these without instruction. Case in point would be the numerous 'feral children' over the centuries who survived perfectly well in the wild without (human) instruction.

 

As for how it's caused, basically, it's evolution. When the nervous system and brain are laid down in development, connections form long before birth, under the guidance of genes. To use my favorite species as an example, before it has even finished emerging from the egg, a baby python can see, smell, feel, move, etc. If you wave a mouse in front of it within minutes of hatching, it will strike with adult-level accuracy, constrict, kill the mouse, and perform the complex and lengthy process of swallowing it. It will then crawl off, able to use any snake locomotion mode available to an adult with full proficiency. The neural patterns for all of these are 'built in' during development, before birth ('premature' pythons are often unable to do any of these, and usually must be euthanized).

 

Over the course of evolutionary time, the genes controlling these patterns can mutate, leading to different patterns. An aquatic species may lose the association between food and the smell of mice, but gain the associate between fish smell and food. Mutations that damage the system are quickly weeded out (even healthy baby pythons have 99%+ mortality rate).

 

Of course, part of the issue is that "instinct" can refer to everything from Fixed Action Patterns (essentially immutable, hard-wired sequences of movements and responses to a given stimuli) to more subtle tendencies such as habitat preferences. Plus, there's learning, which can improve upon or alter some instinctual responses.

 

Unfortunately, some of the truly innovative recent stuff is done on the sea-slug Aplyasia, which is not the sort of neat, sexy thing that gets mention in the popular press, as well as fruit flies and microscopic roundworms (see most studies in behavioral genetics).

 

For more information, google terms like 'ethology', 'fixed action pattern', 'central pattern generator', 'imprinting', and 'behavioral genetics'.

[Phi for All]

I can almost guarantee that if you took a mixed group of 10 five-year-olds with no previous sexual education, and put them in an environment where they could survive without supervision, they would have the reproductive act figured out well before they were capable of reproduction.

 

I've always wondered how much so-called "instinct" was transmitted non-verbally while the fetus is still in the womb. Young animals often are born skittish of bright lights and loud noises, whereas a human infant capable of crawling away would sit in the path of an oncoming truck with its lights and horns blaring. Does the transmission of basic danger senses happen while the fetus is maturing, and its simply a case of humans being less prone to dangerous situations in modern times that leaves us defenseless at very young ages?

[Sisyphus]

Per usual, Wikipedia is pretty helpful for basic questions:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct

 

It seems "instinct" is longer considered a technical term, but a lot of what is popularly called instinct just arises from the architecture of the nervous system, in the form of reflexes, "fixed action patterns" hardwired into the brain, etc. The question "how does a blank know how to blank" seems intuitive, but it's really not fundamentally different than asking how a hand knows how to have four fingers and a thumb.

[granpa]

instinct = common sense

 

eating mice is just common sense from a baby pythons point of view. (see post 3)