eli5. When species are crossbred, do the offspring have a combination of both species? instincts? and if scientists were to splice together multiple species or edit DNA or create a species or something in a laboratory, would it have natural instincts? are the instincts coded into DNA?
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It depends on what genes are transferred. Its like asking if I were to combine the plans of a ranchhouse and an Italian villa, what would the house look like – it depends entirely on _what_ parts of the plans you took from each.
The first question is whether or not the offspring would be viable…meaning whether it would even survive. That depends on what species bred together. Often, the resulting offspring isn’t viable and either doesn’t develop in the womb, is stillborn, or dies shortly after birth.
IF it was viable, it would likely display characteristics and instincts of both species. A great example of this would be a Mule (horse x donkey) which displays some of the best characteristics of both species (depending on how you define “best”). We obviously also see this in dogs which are bred to improve physical traits, hunting instincts, etc.
Many basic instincts and intellectual abilities are inherited so the offspring would likely show *some* characteristics of each parent but probably not 100% of both. There’s going to be a counterbalance or middle ground between the two sets of parental DNA.
When you start talking about manually editing and manipulating DNA, theoretically anything is possible, but I don’t know enough about that to give more information.
Hopefully this answer was helpful.
There was a cross between a polar and a grizzly bear. A hunter killed it, they did DNA on it, it had more grizzly genes than polar genes. Her offspring from the mix (because polar and grizzly bears are similar genetically so have sterile offspring) all chose grizzly mates. They were also all killed, I think there were four generations? Before they were hunted to death.
Mules are a cross between male donkeys and female horses. They are sterile. Smarter than horses (donkeys are really smart) but they still have natural prey animal instincts which aren’t really that different between donkeys and horses.
I’m assuming that the bears have similar number of chromosomes and the horses/donkeys don’t. Mules and hinnys both have 63 chromosomes, a horse has 64, a donkey 62. Mules are male, hinnys are female (and also sterile). Generally the front of a mule or hinny looks like like the sire and the hind parts look like the dam (the female). It’s that chromosomal mismatch that makes the mules and hinny sterile.
>are the instincts coded into DNA?
I want to answer this question because your perception of it might heavily affect how you see the entire topic.
In general, instincts are not coded in the DNA, at least *not directly.* Instinctual behaviour results from how your brain’s neural network structures constantly run in parallel, processing your sensory data – it’s a feature that results from different elements of that system offering a new function while together that none of these elements individually can do, DNA codes how each of those elements is build, but the fact that they result in instinct isn’t affected by their structure as long as each one of them is properly serving their subfunction.
For a good analogy, think that an instinct is like a program installed on your pc. In that scenario, the DNA is like if someone made a blueprint on how to build specifically your current hard drive atom by atom – the code of that instinct program isn’t anywhere on the blueprint itself, but because the blueprint mimics the ideal physical structure of all elements of a disc where that program was already installed, then any future disc that’s made 1 to 1 with 100% accuracy to this blueprint will have this program already preinstalled.
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