how does instinct work? If it’s just “baked” into an animal’s DNA, how does it “activate” and how does it “activate” successfully?
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A lot of answers here do a decent job of explaining what “instinct” _is_, but not how it “activates” or comes to be.
Beyond just the “pre-programmed circuits” that respond to different inputs (such as increased alertness when hearing certain sounds, or that possum playing dead, even while the coyote peed on it), it’s important to realize that members of a species that _didn’t_ respond that way tended to die. If they died before procreating, their “bad instinct” programming didn’t get passed on.
Consider a bird chick that, hypothetically, never picks up on the instinct to fly: it will probably die young. Same for migratory birds; the ones that _don’t_ have the instinct to head south (assuming northern hemisphere) would likely die in the winter (though nowadays, I’m sure some would find food and shelter with people, possibly perpetuating that lack of instinct).
The really wild “instinct” for me is monarch butterfly migrations. It’s several generations for one migratory cycle, so I’m not really sure how that works; but it must, since it does.
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