Thursday 20 October 2011

Instinct

I remain confused. What is instinct and how does it get passed on? I say passed on, but some say this is the wrong way of looking at it, that it is no more passed on than the ability to grow a limb in the right place. I think that not only misses the point, but kind of underestimates the importance and complexity of the limb issue.

Instinct may be seen as a behaviour, but it is a very, very important one and something that cannot be left to learning. Those for whom the ideology of Darwinism must be followed at all times, will say that it is just that the behaviour seen as an instinct just means those are more likely to survive, just like having the best placed limbs does. But for me, this is even weaker that the evolution theory that only the best survive.

A baby kangaroo is born, clings to its mothers fur, climbs up to the pouch, crawls in and feeds on the teat there. That is quite a chain of events to encode let alone for it to have evolved and only its children survived. In a survival of the fittest competition, making things that difficult for the newborn would seem a recipe for disaster, but then I'm not tied to the ideology, just seeking answers.

In every debate I've seen though, the original question of instinct rapidly shoots off into discussions of behaviour and I don't think that is the place to start. For me, I question how the instinct comes about. I feel that it is a learned behaviour that is so important that through some mechanism it becomes implanted and yes, then grows just as sure a piece of us as a limb.

Problem is though, whether through Darwinian luck or learned behaviour that realises, even at an unconscious level, its importance and is encoded, how did the first Joey make the trip? I guess at some point kangaroo's may have assisted the newborn on its way, but then, progressively decided they couldn't be bothered and left the tot to his own devices, by which time the encoding was in place.

I don't think this is blind watchmaker stuff though. I think there is a mechanism that tells the brain to hard wire certain things that are repeatedly important. Like when I exercise and this damages the muscle, which repairs itself but 'decides' to repair itself stronger all the better to meet the challenge it didn't cope with so well before. Why would our bodies 'assume' that? Why is the repair not random in its achievements, making the muscle sometimes stronger sometimes not.

It is not an evolutionary benefit, it is an instant benefit and we all do it. Oh I know, it is only creatures that developed this trait that survived, hence it is universal. That is part of the problem I have with the Theory of Evolution; that all pronouncements about it rely on hindsight, a wonderful gift but not very useful for scientific endeavour. In fact, it positively inhibits it.

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