You don’t believe the site I provided that says babies develop a fear of heights before they can learn to crawl?
Lenny, I’m getting the feeling you are only here looking for an argument, and that is not what this forum is about. Your analysis of RickJay’s post contains absolutely no factual information. I strongly suggest you supply some cites to back up your assertions, or at the very least, some good, logical reasoning why you believe all the other posters are wrong.
Lenny, by your definition dogs don’t show any instinctual behavior - because with training and learning, their “instinctual” behaviors can at least sometimes be overridden.
Your objections to many of the examples cited by RickJay and x-ray are, once again, based on your using a different definition than they are.
No at all. Babies will quite cheerfully learn to walk without anyone showing them how to walk. How exactly do you ‘show’ a baby how to walk?
Equally erroneous. Babies that are deaf have actually exhibited the ability to learn a unique sign language when placed with other deaf children. These sign languages have full syntax, a complete vocabulary and so forth. Are you saying that two children that have never heard a language have spontaneously taught each other?
Even blind babies smile.
I also just heard a discussion on NPR involving a social scientist who made sure to work with a group of people from Paupau New Guinie (sp?) who had never seen a camera, and many of whom had never seen a person of a different color. He filmed them as they answered interpreted questions, like “What would your face look like if you were fighting?”
He said everyone would be able to identify the expressions without any help. It was proof to him that the basic facial expressions are hard-wired.
I thought this was caused by a resonance in the ear, not a sensitivity in the brain.
I remember in physics class, the teacher set up a tone generator and gradually raised the frequency. A narrow band of frequencies seemed much louder than the surrounding ones, and he explained that the ear is most sensitive there, implying that a baby’s cry had adapted to those particular frequencies.
I’ll concede the point. I’m not about to get involved in another argument revolving around “dueling definitions.”
But when you hear a baby crying on TV, whom you have no familiarity with, whom you are in no position to help, you still have that pull, that drive to do something to try to ease its pain. You have no idea whether it’s in trouble, or if it’s merely cranky, or even if it’s just some prerecorded tape that’s been inserted into the scene.
And when babies are first born, they have no idea that crying will get them additional attention. Over time, they will learn that, of course, and will start to whine when something isn’t going exactly the way they want. But not the first time.
For that matter, why does anybody cry? When you experience some gut-wrenching, world-shaking event, without conscious thought, your pulse quickens, you hunch over, clench your face into a frown, and water flows from your eyes.
Everyone does it. No one is “trained” to cry when they’re sad.
In addition to what Blake said - and I think this might relate more directly to your comment, Lenny - babies of deaf parents babble. They don’t learn it from their parents or their environment (which is mostly the same for very young children). You would be hard-pressed to find a linguist who disagrees with that, or who doesn’t feel that our brains our wired for language on an EVOLUTIONARY basis. Grammar is too complex to be 100% learned. Language is too complex, too adaptive, too recusive. Every sentence in this post is unique - there is almost total certainty that no one has ever used those words in that exact order until right now. But I did not have to learn every single word in its proper order to know that they form a coherent sentence. We have an instinct for language. Read some Chomsky sometime. If your teacher said that most scientists think we have no instincts, he was dead wrong, because this is accepted by nearly all linguists.
You have also, as mentioned before, failed to back up anything you’ve said. You asked for our opinions, but it sounds like you aren’t interested unless someone agrees (which, thus far, nobody has without extreme qualification).
I don’t think your explanation of the “fight-or-flight” reaction makes sense. Why do we all react that way when we’re afraid? All people react the same way. Doesn’t that go a long way to saying it’s an instinct?
What about the way we speak to children and small animals? Have you ever noticed that people raise the pitch of their voices when doing this? Ever thought about why? There’s no real reason - except that children (I’m not sure about animals) hear better at those frequencies. But I bet you didn’t know that, did you? And I’m pretty sure your friends and parents didn’t either. Our ancestors learned it a long time ago, and the behavior is wired into your brain. Got a different explanation?
Some other thoughts: do you raise your voice when you’re angry, Lenny? Why? You might answer “it communicates how I’m feeling” - but how do you know it does that? How do you know how people will respond to it? And how do other people know what that behavior means?
What about laughter? Same set of questions. Why do you laugh when something is funny? I doubt you can argue it’s learned, since babies do it from a very young age.
Do you look down at your feet in certain situations? When you’re confused or being chastised, for example? Do you scratch your head, perhaps? When did you learn to do this?
For that matter, who taught you to scratch an itch? How did you know rubbing your nails against a spot (or rubbing it against something) would make it feel better?
And as to your (unsupported) rebuttals: show me a woman who doesn’t flirt. Or who never does so. (I admit flirting has to be defined first, but the poster who brough it up can do so.) Show me examples to back up anything you say in that post, especially in that part. Show me a study that says women don’t tend to dress more provocatively when they’re ovulating (I assume ovulating is what is meant). And maybe more importantly, tell me why it’s not an instinct just because some people don’t do it. You use that tactic over and over again. Language is instinctual, even if not everyone does it (some people are mute, some are too learning disabled, etc). Everyone, assuming they are not too severely disabled, tries to do it.
Good point. Although I would be willing to accept your definition of “reason” and ask if chimps can, in certain instances be said to posses “reason”. I know they are able to solve novel problems w/o resorting to trial and error.
From Merriam-Webster:
Yes, chimps, since they can “infer” solutions to problems, can be said to reason.
But I bet I could devise a definition that only applied to humans (just like the one for instinct). 
Colibri:
Agreed. The OP definition of instinct was unnecessarily restrictive. I would say language acquisition is an instinct. It happens before children are able to reason, and it does not have to be taught. They will pick it up just by observing.
Two particularly interesting possible instintive behaviours mentioned here are ‘fear of falling’ and ‘fear of snakes’. Both have apparently been demonstrated in chimpanzees, with whom , according to some definitons, we share a genus.
Anybody seen good references for these?
Most other examples are not so much ‘instincts’ as ‘innate capacities’- still amazing to think that there is an innate capacity for language and walking somehow encoded into the genome, which turns out to be smaller than pre Genome Project estimates.
How is all that stuff crammed into the genome, as well as all the protein-folding instructions required to build a human?
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Another example that just sprang to mind: stroking the hair at the back of your neck when suppressing anger. Can’t find a cite at the moment, but I recall reading it’s a primate thing: a modification of the instinct to hit out with an overarm fist (an action that can be seen in small children before they learn to fight with conventional underarm punches).
According to what definitions? Humans belong to the genus Homo and are its sole members, h. sapiens.
Q.E.D. - in the news recently, some scientist suggested moving chimpanzees into genus homo because they share more DNA with humans than they do with gorillas. While true, I don’t think the move will be seriously conisdered.
“Genus,” like any other category above the species level, is a somewhat arbitrary category. Taxonomists differ as to what level of morphological or genetic differentiation merits designation as a separate genus. Chimps and humans are similar enough genetically that a case can be made for combining them in the same genus.
From here:
OK how about this for an instinct:
When a young baby is startled its hands try to grasp hold of things.
Supposidly for when we lived in trees. A baby would have to grab its mothers fur so they could leg it if attacked or something. I would say this is an instinct because this provides no advantage to a baby in the modern world. Its not something they would bother learning as it has no advantage so must be an instinct.