I don’t know if “learned behavior” is the right term for this. But say we trained every dog in the world to do a specific thing for the next 500 years, would it eventually become an instinct?
In: Biology
That’s not how it works.
Creatures are born with instinct. The only way to build “new” instinct over time is to have a genetic mutation that changes how a creature’s brain* works and then have that creature pass that mutation on to it’s offspring.
For example, when we bred dogs we just picked the ones that were naturally friendlier and did that over and over. You can’t pick dog that didn’t like people at birth but you then trained to be friendly. As soon as that dog has a puppy you are back to square one, unless it’s offspring randomly mutated to be friendlier.
*Using brain in a broad sense to cover all the hardware the controls a creature’s behavior, not everything has a traditional “brain” but still has instincts all the way down to single celled organisms.
Edit: probably deserves a bit more detail/nuance. But there *is* something called the “Baldwin effect” which is kind of related to what you are talking about. Basically something can start as a learned behavior and then over subsequent generations creatures can have a change to turn that into a mutation.
But that still won’t turn a learned behavior into instinct on it’s own. That learned behavior must still manifest as a physical mutation, and having the mutation has to result in a creature out competing creatures without it.
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