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 o

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