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There's no way for evolution to read the history of how an organism responded to something and codify it into an instinct. All it can operate on is whether the

There's no way for evolution to read the history of how an organism responded to something and codify it into an instinct. All it can operate on is whether the organism reproduced. If a tendency to mull things over made the organism survive, that's what gets codified, not the actions it chose. The whole advantage of thinking is being able to select adaptive responses to situations that change too rapidly for evolution to ever hard code as instincts.

cwmoore 1y ago
“There’s no way…” “The whole advantage…” may not break site guidelines, but the preface is almost never correct.
perrygeo 1y ago
The history of an individual organism can be read by future generations. But it's through epigenetics, not genetics - adding methyl groups to the DNA, which influence gene expression. These are inherited, but the changes only last a few generations and have limited (though not zero!) impact on evolution since they don't seem to persist in the genetic code. Beyond that, culture has a huge role to play. Many complex lifeforms learn how to survive from their parents and peers. Those groups with less adaptive strategies will be wiped out. For many organisms, they are not "thinking" per se, they are processing sensory data in the way they've been taught. The "thinking" was done by multilevel selection, weeding out ineffective strategies. IOW, no organism technically needs to think through a problem from first principles. There's always some cultural heuristic to fall back on. Second paragraph is spot on. The search space is far too large for evolution to provide direct solutions for every challenge a multicellular lifeform could face. General solutions rule. But it's likely that cultural adaptation plays a larger role than individual cognition. One could argue the prokaryotic life is 100% instinct though - adaptive responses seem to be pretty rare in bacteria.
dboreham 1y ago
Glad someone else is posting this now. For years I felt it was only me. To repeat: there is no such thing as "instinct" in higher animals (fish++). This is because, as parent notes, there is no information flow pathway from life experience to DNA, and note way to encode anything in the form of brain memories (ROM) into DNA.
- gf000 1y ago
  As mentioned, there are some very rudimentary ways where "runtime" can affect the next generation (epigenetics), but nothing like actually learning and teaching across generations.

cwmoore 1y ago

“There’s no way…” “The whole advantage…” may not break site guidelines, but the preface is almost never correct.

perrygeo 1y ago

The history of an individual organism can be read by future generations. But it's through epigenetics, not genetics - adding methyl groups to the DNA, which influence gene expression. These are inherited, but the changes only last a few generations and have limited (though not zero!) impact on evolution since they don't seem to persist in the genetic code. Beyond that, culture has a huge role to play. Many complex lifeforms learn how to survive from their parents and peers. Those groups with less adaptive strategies will be wiped out. For many organisms, they are not "thinking" per se, they are processing sensory data in the way they've been taught. The "thinking" was done by multilevel selection, weeding out ineffective strategies. IOW, no organism technically needs to think through a problem from first principles. There's always some cultural heuristic to fall back on. Second paragraph is spot on. The search space is far too large for evolution to provide direct solutions for every challenge a multicellular lifeform could face. General solutions rule. But it's likely that cultural adaptation plays a larger role than individual cognition. One could argue the prokaryotic life is 100% instinct though - adaptive responses seem to be pretty rare in bacteria.

dboreham 1y ago

Glad someone else is posting this now. For years I felt it was only me. To repeat: there is no such thing as "instinct" in higher animals (fish++). This is because, as parent notes, there is no information flow pathway from life experience to DNA, and note way to encode anything in the form of brain memories (ROM) into DNA.

gf000 1y ago
As mentioned, there are some very rudimentary ways where "runtime" can affect the next generation (epigenetics), but nothing like actually learning and teaching across generations.