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?

Question

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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Answer 1

>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.