how does instinct work? If it’s just “baked” into an animal’s DNA, how does it “activate” and how does it “activate” successfully?
In: 513
I guess I can describe a small sliver of what would form a larger part of an “instinct” to illustrate a point.
Take as an example an insect or animal that might hunt crickets. We can measure their brain activity and see it responds with different strength to different sounds, and like most traits, the responsiveness will range on a gradient — kind of like how people run the range from short to tall or skinny to fat or weak to strong.
The animals that are born with neurons that respond more strongly to the right sound for their surrounding prey will do better at eating and reproducing, having children that are also more likely to respond to the appropriate sounds.
And maybe some of those offspring are naturally aggressive while some are more passive — and guess which ones will do better at surviving, by munching on prey and getting the energy to bang out more offspring, with like genetics and thus behavior.
But maybe some develop so much aggression, they then start picking fights with bigger stronger animals or humans, resulting in them getting culled — next thing you know, you end up with a generation of offspring that are tuned to chase after sounds that lead them to the right prey, which they react aggressively to, but that also learn to avoid messing with other predators or more dangerous competitors — since the ones that didn’t follow that pattern were naturally culled by starvation or ass kicking.
Simplifying things, but between reflex loops, neuron responsiveness to specific stimuli, and general evolution, you can intuitively explain a lot of instinctual behavior — as simplfiied as my above breakdown is. It’s neat with lower life forms because you can really map out the specific neuron circuits and responses.
Latest Answers