How does a baby bird know to act like a poisonous worm when a predator shows up? The answer is genetic memory, but how does it work? How does it get encoded into dna, passed down, and executed.
In: Biology
There’s no memory, you have the cart before the horse. Let’s say you’ve got a gene which makes your neck twitch, and you’re therefore constantly instinctively and involuntarily looking in different directions as a result. That behavior causes you to spot a predator before you’re killed, and therefore you survive to spawn offspring and pass on that trait. Genes don’t learn, they only change at random, and the random ones changes which benefit the organism will help that organism outlast random changes which do not.
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