There are some behaviors which animals will adopt even if they’ve never been taught.
For example, cats tend to bury their feces or seek high vantage spots even if it’s never been taught to them and they individually have never had a reason to adopt that behavior having never met neither predator nor prey.
Often, it’s the result of survival strategies that make sense in the wild. So, how is that passed down?
The high level answer is, the animal’s DNA determines the structure of the brain and features of the brain produce the instincts.
–Mark
And it’s “learned” the same way any other evolved trait is: Those who had those behaviors were more successful and left more offspring than those who didn’t have those behaviors.
Got it in one… although I don’t think it’s not well understood how this works.
I think it manifests as “urges”, just as Disney would say in whatever documentary.
Think about your own experience with bodily functions. You just have an urge to piss or defecate, and you go, whether anyone trained you or not.
Sex functions are a particularly good example, both because they are a bit more complex, and because we see that time after time kids figure this stuff out without having it explained for them (even with active suppression of teaching opportunities). Admittedly, there are no shortage of (hopefully only slightly) older volunteer “teachers” for the full sex act, but I suspect that many learn to masturbate on their own.
So, I imagine that a cat might feel nervous or “not quite right” if it’s not surveying its domain from a position of advantage, or conversely feels “good” when up high.
My dog always scratches the turf after she poops (probably to leave visual cues for other dogs), but never after she pees. Again, I think that the one behavior sets up a condition in her brain such that she feels ‘good’ if she does it, like scratching an itch.
We are much the same, although our brains have a lot more learned behaviors, we seem to be very good at suppressing instinctive behaviors, and our minds are so self-reflecting and meta, everything gets tangled up.
someone did an experiment with caterpillars and moths. They made the caterpillars dislike a smell. Then when they became moths they also disliked the same smell. But the process of becoming a moth pretty much means they go back to just a bunch of goo and cells and they then turn into a moth. But even with that big change the smell is passed on.
Isn’t that what we all are?
–Mark
Of course. But this doesn’t really explain anything. How this actually works is hardly understood. If someone were to find the actual genetic basis for the transmission of instinctual behavior they would be in line for a Nobel Prize (or the equivalent, since there is no Nobel Prize for Biology).
Actually, I think that’s supposed to be burying the poop, so the smell of it doesn’t scare off prey. But the full instinct got broken somewhere in the domestication process, so they don’t actually effectively bury it any more.
The classic “textbook” example of instinctive behavior is the characteristic patterns of various species of birds’ nests.