# How Does Instinct Work **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 9, 2023, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882 "2023-11-09T20:48:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![TeroSunbear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terosunbear/32/14748_2.png) [@TeroSunbear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TeroSunbear)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2023, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/21 "2023-11-10T19:07:41Z")
They must be, as many animals would not survive from birth without then. But it is difficult to track it down to DNA. We know some behavior is liked to neurons and receptors and neurotransmitters, Some neurotransmitters are passed around in the brain as they are not made in all neurons. So we can raise levels of some. But even there the result is both “nature and nurture.” Complex behavior such as bird building nests is even more difficult to track down. Some bird song might be tracked down by now. Non-passerines such as flycatchers inherit song. They do not need to hear it to learn it. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2023, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/22 "2023-11-10T19:35:23Z")
> [@Moriarty](#): > > […] it’s fascinating to think about things I may do that are _purely_ instinctual, precisely because human behavior is so complex. If you think about those things long enough, it will get more complicated. Are you sure that suckling is an instinct? That seems to be the consensus so far here, but what if I argued it is a reflex? The swallowing part of suckling surely is. The movement of the lips and the tongue seem to me to be one too. And alternating swallowing and breathing to avoid choking too. So it seems to me that some “instincts”, at least the simpler ones, can be explained as concatenation of reflexes. Add to the simple basic instincts observation, repetition, iteration, experience, thinking and the interaction with others and the environement – all of which is in the nature of humans and to a varying degree of many other animals – and you can get the most convoluted complex behaviour. Which is what happens in reality, is it not? Now if every action goes back to elementary reflexes, what happens to free will? I will be forced to admit that we do not have any. But we have the instinct that makes us believe we have, to avoid falling into dispair. ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2023, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/23 "2023-11-10T20:58:02Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > Not that you have suggested it, but it’s also a very common and deeply flawed model that we have “base” instincts and that reason allows us to “rise above them”. But it’s complete nonsense - our social cooperative behavior is just as much a part of our nature as fighting and fuckin As I mentioned, a lot of our innate behaviour revolves around being social or pack animals. For example, we can read incredibly subtle facial expressions without needing to learn - and by learning can pick up even more. But reading others’ moods is a skill that humans cannot wait to learn and perfect, so it is still vey much innate. It’s sufficiently subtle that we can tell, for example, a forced smile from a real one. We recognize hundreds of people from their facial appearance, and people familiar enough with identical twins learn to tell them apart - although we spend an hour trying to find Waldo on a page. So certain pattens are easy to grasp, others - not related to socializing - are hard. So not so much “rise above them” as add to them, with learning. Socializing for example balances self-interest with a desire to be liked, and so to help others. We “feel good” when we help others. We empathize with people who are suffering. (And we want to threaten and hurt people who are trying to hurt us) And so on… Our upbringing and life experience builds on that, either to minimize some behaviours or to build on others. IMHO humans are neither good nor evil but mercurial - we have moods and inclinations depneding on a variety of inputs and those guide us in acting out. ---
**Author:** ![Longweekends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/2acd7d/32.png) [@Longweekends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Longweekends)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2023, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/24 "2023-11-10T22:07:47Z")
Yes, the movements involved in breastfeeding (or bottle feeding) are known to be a [series of reflexes](https://www.rch.org.au/feedingdifficulties/difficulties/Reflexes_involved_in_feeding/). Where scientists draw the line between this and an “instinct”, I don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2023, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/25 "2023-11-10T22:30:32Z")
I guess the line is blurry, because words/categories are artificial. We use them to make sense of our observations, but are they _real_? It depends on the definition of real, and there it gets philosophical/interesting. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2023, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/26 "2023-11-11T01:05:12Z")
This is a very interesting question. Up there with “Was math created by man or did it always exist?”. I won’t go there though. As far as instinct, I think it’s more of a Darwin question. “When you don’t get what you want, you get experience”. Or death. Pass it on. ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2023, 10:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/27 "2023-11-11T10:34:43Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > Or bees - “smoking” bees creates an instinctive reaction where they tend to ignore intruders to focus on loading up on honey in case they need to swarm… handy for beekeepers) Smoking bees is interesting. Beehives are governed by a range of pheromones, most emitted by the queen, but some by workers, and the whole shebang runs as a set of equilibrium behaviours mediated by pheromones ramping up or down. Smoking mimics one of the pheromones. Not well, but given enough smoke, well enough. It matters what the smoker is burning. Things like pheromone mediated behaviour are an interesting adjunct to instinct. The presence of a queen controls how the hive behaves. She emits one pheromone that suppresses development of other queens. If the queen dies or becomes old and weak the hive starts to begin behaviours to replace her based on nothing but the lowering of strength of that pheromone. (So much so that if the queen is weak, not enough of the pheromone will reach the ends of the hive, and workers will start building queen cells out at the edges.) You can map out a whole intricate set of pheromone mediated control loops. These include control of population, and swarming. If this were a single organism we would just talk about hormone mediated controls. It isn’t hard to imagine how each of these controls could evolve. It seems a stretch to call this instinct - which is what makes it an interesting question. The bee dance is much weirder. It isn’t a collective thing, and it isn’t just chemical. It relies on one bee doing its thing, and the others responding. One day we will probably map enough of the bee brain to find the dance circuits. Bee brain is a pretty amazing thing. It packs a lot of stuff into a very small package. Us bigger critters suffer a lot form the impact of square cube in comparison. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2023, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/28 "2023-11-11T16:13:49Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > If this were a single organism we would just talk about hormone mediated controls. I think part of the question is whether we should be considering the individual bee, or the entire hive, to be the “single organism”. Fascinating stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2023, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/29 "2023-11-11T19:36:08Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > If this were a single organism In a multicellular organism, somatic cells sacrifice any direct evolutionary future and devote themselves completely to the wellbeing of the germline cells. This strategy makes sense because all cells carry the exact same DNA. Kin selection among separate but related organisms works in a similar way, although the self sacrifice is rarely complete. We are most amenable to self sacrifice to other organisms to which we are most closely related, because their wellbeing has the highest probability of getting copies of our own DNA into the next generation. We can view eusocial colonies as being somewhere between these two cases. Bees in a colony do not all share _exactly_ the same DNA, but in a haplodiploid system they are usually very closely related, to a point where the self sacrifice of non-breeding workers for the breeding lineage looks very much like the complete self sacrifice of somatic cells in a single multicellular organism. > **[Eusociality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality)** > > Eusociality (from Greek εὖ eu "good" and social), the highest level of organization of sociality, is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. The division of labor creates specialized behavioral groups within an animal society which are sometimes referred to as 'castes'. Eusociality is distinguished ... > **[Haplodiploidy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy)** > > Haplodiploidy is a sex-determination system in which males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid, and females develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid. Haplodiploidy is sometimes called arrhenotoky. > Haplodiploidy determines the sex in all members of the insect orders Hymenoptera (bees, ants, and wasps) and Thysanoptera ('thrips'). The system also occurs sporadically in some spider mites, Hemiptera, Coleoptera (bark beetles), and rotifers. > In this system, sex is determined by the nu... I hate killing anything unnecessarily, even a pest animal, and I often wonder (quite seriously) whether from a moral perspective killing an ant to prevent an invasion is killing an organism, or really more like cutting your fingernails. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 12:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/30 "2023-11-12T12:04:48Z")
LIke the bird instinct to build a nest without being taught, I always assumed that flying was similarly instinctive. Which made the gesture made by a well-meaning human ultralight pilot to “train” geese to fly a little silly. The geese should have been training the pilots instead. But this brings up another question: Since flying birds evolved from non-flying ones, at what point did the success of a flying experiment translate into instinct for the following generations? Surely the instinct wasn’t there before flight capability was acquired (=useless), but evolved later. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 12:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/31 "2023-11-12T12:17:47Z")
I don’t think the pilots teach the geese to fly, they show them the route to fly for their migration: in which direction to fly, time of the year to fly, where there are suitable resting places, and where to stop. And then back. After one season they know it. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/32 "2023-11-12T14:49:04Z")
So what happens if pilots aren’t available? Do geese not migrate? ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/33 "2023-11-12T14:52:10Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > Since flying birds evolved from non-flying ones, at what point did the success of a flying experiment translate into instinct for the following generations? When the proto-birds without any instinct to use their proto-wings in a productive manner crashed into the ground and died, and only the ones that didn’t crash into the ground and die had offspring. > [@Musicat](#): > > Surely the instinct wasn’t there before flight capability was acquired (=useless), but evolved later. Less flippantly, you can’t be so reductive as to say “wings must have evolved first, then an instinct to use them”. Wings would not evolve at all by natural selection if they were not being used for a productive purpose. It’s possible that proto-wing could evolve while being used for a _different_ purpose, and then an “instinct mutation” occurs to start using it for proto-flight. But however it comes about, the brain that controls a body part is obviously going to be evolving by natural selection simultaneously with the body part. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/34 "2023-11-12T15:17:13Z")
From many of the comments in the thread, it’s apparent that a lot of people have a very strange model of the brain that “instincts” are ONLY specific discrete behaviors like “suckle” “fuck” or “fly south for the winter”, and the rest of the neural architecture is… well I don’t know _what_ they think it is. We can certainly use the word “instinct” as a noun to refer to specific discrete behaviors. But “instinctive” just means innate, and _everything_ about the brain of every animal is fundamentally constructed by genetic programming that was largely determined by natural selection - albeit (especially for humans) greatly influenced _also_ by learning and experience. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/35 "2023-11-12T15:20:07Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > Since flying birds evolved from non-flying ones, at what point did the success of a flying experiment translate into instinct for the following generations? This is where I suspect that individual neuro chemistry starts to play a role in evolution and selection. Neuro chemistry is one of the biggest variables that I can think of. The first neuro chemical experience an embryo would have would come from the father through the seminal fluids that both the egg and the sperm were exposed to during conception. Everything we experience creates a slightly different neuro cocktail. This unique neuro cocktail would become the brains reference point from the moment of conception forward. Kind of like balancing a bicycle, the behavior would seek out this balance. Like when building a nest, a very specific movement or action would produce a comfortable balance in the brain. This is pure speculation on my part but I do believe there is something significant to it. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/36 "2023-11-12T15:23:32Z")
> [@HoneyBadgerDC](#): > > This is pure speculation on my part It is utter nonsense that (as has been amply demonstrated in your thread) contradicts elementary and well understood principles of biology and evolution and is not supported by a shred of evidence. It is pseudoscientific claptrap. Reported for hijacking. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/37 "2023-11-12T15:35:17Z")
[Moderating] This is Factual Questions, where we should strive for factual answers. If you have any factual answers, feel free to share. If you have unsupported random speculations, save those for IMHO. ---
**Author:** ![TeroSunbear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terosunbear/32/14748_2.png) [@TeroSunbear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TeroSunbear)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/38 "2023-11-12T16:14:19Z")
Instinct is not used much in college biology texts. They use innate behavior. [10.4: Innate Behavior of Animals - Biology LibreTexts](https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Introductory_Biology_(CK-12)/10%3A_Animals/10.04%3A_Innate_Behavior_of_Animals) ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/39 "2023-11-12T16:16:46Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > So what happens if pilots aren’t available? Do geese not migrate? Ordinarily young birds migrate along with older geese, who know the way. (How the routes originally developed I believe is still a mystery, at least to humans.) I believe the instruction was necessary because older geese weren’t available to those particular birds. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2023, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882/40 "2023-11-12T16:18:00Z")
> [@TeroSunbear](#): > > Instinct is not used much in college biology texts. They use innate behavior. They are synonymous, but given what I’ve seen in this thread I suspect the choice of language is to get people away from this misconceived model of thinking of “an instinct” only as a discrete behavior, rather than thinking of an entire neural architecture as innately modeled. ETA: having said that, that text is terrible, talking as though it’s a binary that behaviors are either innate or they are not. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-instinct-work/992882.md?page=3)