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How would you explain why birds raised in isolation can still build nests? And sing the songs of their species? I would propose that it is possible that some

by swamp40 13y ago

How would you explain why birds raised in isolation can still build nests? And sing the songs of their species? I would propose that it is possible that some animal "instincts" are really inherited memories from their ancestors. And that if we look hard enough and deep enough, we may find similar human "instincts". Have you ever seen a baby with a fear of spiders? Whose parents swear the child has never even seen a spider before?

chc 13y ago
The leap from "Instincts are inherited" to "This is because memories are inherited" is the furthest thing from science you could possibly get.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Any falsifiable hypothesis is scientific.
  - chc 13y ago
    And this hypothesis presents no testable predictions. It's more or less equivalent to "A wizard did it."
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      > I would propose that it is possible that some animal "instincts" are really inherited memories from their ancestors. I think that's pretty testable, just find a way to condition the ancestors and see if the conditioning shows up in the offspring.
      - chc 13y ago
        But it's obvious that he's not saying all memories are inherited (at least, not in a way we can detect), so a negative result is not disproof.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        A negative result disproves it for the specific kind of memory, e.g. fear of spiders, but you're right that the disproof can't be straightforwardly transferred to claims about other kinds of memories. The hypothesis is so unlikely given what we know about the brain and reproduction that we'll assume false by default for all memories. Thus the onus is on the experimenter to provide a positive result for some case and also demonstrate that there isn't something else going on.
- swamp40 13y ago
  My views reflect Darwin's. Is he scientific enough for you? May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times? - Charles Darwin, A Biographical Sketch of an Infant (1877)
  - chc 13y ago
    Darwin has the "Instincts are inherited" part, but not the "This is because memories are inherited" part, which is what I was questioning.
  - tristanj 13y ago
    The quote you picked doesn't fully support your view - if you read the full quote, Darwin suggests that such inherited effects start to appear at one point in one's life and disappear afterwards. If instincts were truly passed on as memories, then they should be present throughout life and not appear when such evolutionary adaption is needed. This conflicts with evolutionary developmental psychological theory, which suggests that people face different survival adaptive problems at various points of their lifetime. For example, problems of survival as an infant must occur before problems of mating. Mating must predictably occur before parenting, and likewise before grand-parenting. From this, we expect certain "instincts" to appear and disappear as adaptive problems change. This is known to be true in infants: two examples are an infant's ability to swim (which disappears after 6 months) and also the Moro reflex, a potentially lifesaving reflex that occurs while falling. If these were "memories" and not instincts, then they would not appear so rapidly nor so consistently. There's quite a few examples of similar instincts listed on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes
  - saalweachter 13y ago
    1. Darwin was pre-DNA. His guesses on the mechanisms of evolution aren't very relevant to the modern understanding. 2. Darwin was not infallible. We pick our scientific heroes because of their ability to advance science, to see farther than others, and be remarkably right given the information they had. Our heroes were still wrong about a lot of things, both outside there areas of expertise and inside their areas of expertise. For instance, Newton was the foremost expert on light of the day, and advanced our understanding of optics greatly, but he thought it was a particle. He was wrong, and we do him no honor by believing it a particle in his name.

by swamp40 13y ago

chc 13y ago

The leap from "Instincts are inherited" to "This is because memories are inherited" is the furthest thing from science you could possibly get.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Any falsifiable hypothesis is scientific.
- chc 13y ago
  And this hypothesis presents no testable predictions. It's more or less equivalent to "A wizard did it."
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    > I would propose that it is possible that some animal "instincts" are really inherited memories from their ancestors. I think that's pretty testable, just find a way to condition the ancestors and see if the conditioning shows up in the offspring.
    - chc 13y ago
      But it's obvious that he's not saying all memories are inherited (at least, not in a way we can detect), so a negative result is not disproof.
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
        A negative result disproves it for the specific kind of memory, e.g. fear of spiders, but you're right that the disproof can't be straightforwardly transferred to claims about other kinds of memories. The hypothesis is so unlikely given what we know about the brain and reproduction that we'll assume false by default for all memories. Thus the onus is on the experimenter to provide a positive result for some case and also demonstrate that there isn't something else going on.
swamp40 13y ago
My views reflect Darwin's. Is he scientific enough for you? May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times? - Charles Darwin, A Biographical Sketch of an Infant (1877)
- chc 13y ago
  Darwin has the "Instincts are inherited" part, but not the "This is because memories are inherited" part, which is what I was questioning.
- tristanj 13y ago
  The quote you picked doesn't fully support your view - if you read the full quote, Darwin suggests that such inherited effects start to appear at one point in one's life and disappear afterwards. If instincts were truly passed on as memories, then they should be present throughout life and not appear when such evolutionary adaption is needed. This conflicts with evolutionary developmental psychological theory, which suggests that people face different survival adaptive problems at various points of their lifetime. For example, problems of survival as an infant must occur before problems of mating. Mating must predictably occur before parenting, and likewise before grand-parenting. From this, we expect certain "instincts" to appear and disappear as adaptive problems change. This is known to be true in infants: two examples are an infant's ability to swim (which disappears after 6 months) and also the Moro reflex, a potentially lifesaving reflex that occurs while falling. If these were "memories" and not instincts, then they would not appear so rapidly nor so consistently. There's quite a few examples of similar instincts listed on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes
- saalweachter 13y ago
  1. Darwin was pre-DNA. His guesses on the mechanisms of evolution aren't very relevant to the modern understanding. 2. Darwin was not infallible. We pick our scientific heroes because of their ability to advance science, to see farther than others, and be remarkably right given the information they had. Our heroes were still wrong about a lot of things, both outside there areas of expertise and inside their areas of expertise. For instance, Newton was the foremost expert on light of the day, and advanced our understanding of optics greatly, but he thought it was a particle. He was wrong, and we do him no honor by believing it a particle in his name.