Ok so this one is hard for me to explain. What can I say? I was in a weird mood the day it popped in my head.
So the question isn’t “fresh” and I have no idea if I can word things effectively.
Basically though, Humans have the ability to have a thought and act against it. We can make decisions despite it being detrimental to us on many levels.
Science teaches us that Animals… or rather MOST animals don’t have that same ability and that is what mostly separates us from them. Animals have instincts and little or no higher brain functions(don’t quote me on that).
When they are in danger their instincts steer them hopefully towards the best possible outcome for survival. I’m sure this enables animals in peril to react quicker due to the lack of thinking involved.
The question I’m courting here is why or how even do instincts exist, how do they justify life over death? That life is “good”.
To a person who debates things like this, if you take away all the emotion involved -all the emotion of the subject and strip it down to just words and their respective definitions with none of the emotions that we project on each word and definitions…
How did “life” become the “good” sought after option and “death” not, that instincts in animals automatically seek survival?
Because you see, to me, telling me that it’s hard coded in genetics doesn’t content me enough. Is there more of an answer than that?
There is no “survival instinct” as such, just a set of instincts that have been honed by evolution so that, in fact, they tend to keep an animal alive. They make it do stuff like eating when it feels hungry, drinking when it is thirsty, and drive it to get away from anything that causes it pain or looks scary. These things keep it alive, but it does not know it is doing them for that reason.
Animals that don’t have instincts favoring survival die, and don’t reproduce. Animal with strong survival instincts live and reproduce, and these instincts are passed down. There’s no more to it than that. If your specie doesn’t “seek survival” then your specie will go extinct (the way of the dodo that precisely lacked survival instinct).
There is no inherent reason that life is favored over death. However, mutations that encourage life result in creatures that are more likely to succeed, and mutations that encourage life result in creatures that are more likely to die.
Unless you believe God guided evolution, there’s no overarching purpose to it. Things just happened because they self-perpetuate.
hmm, but doesn’t that either mean it “just happened that way” and things could have easily just been inherently geared to not seek survival forcing species to come into existence and die out at a quicker rate of turn-over
OR, that some kind of “learning” happens at some biological level in animals that predisposes them to act in ways that keep them alive?
The dodo was intelligent enough (as birds go) to survive for a very long time, overcoming all the natural adversities presented in their insular environment. Until one day some new invasive organisms arrived on the island, against which the dodo had no prior defensive experience. Ebola came to Mauritius, in the form of Dutch sailors and their followers. Who characterized the dodo as being “too stupid to be afraid of us” in a place where they had never had anything to fear.
Given two otherwise similar species occupying the same niche, the individuals who are better at *individual *survival will out-reproduce and out-survive the other ones.
The effect over time is the better-surviving *species *will the one containing the better-surviving individuals.
So individual skill at surviving drives towards longer-lasting species. Rapid turnover of shorter-lasting species is not stable in the presence of competition.
Except …
Species can get really, really good at their niche. So good in fact that if the niche changes, they’re screwed. Mother Nature (and Humanity) frequently stirs the niches vigorously. Which is why once-superbly-adapted and long-existing species like dinosaurs aren’t here today.
Picture evolution as the flight of pellets from a shotgun. These are weird pellets that oscillate back and forth along their trajectory. They also periodically split into multiple pellets that have slightly trajectories or patterns of oscillation (frequency, width, orientation, etc.) from their parent.
Some shifts cause the pellets to fly into an obstacle, ending their flight. Other shifts, cause pellets to swerve away from a given obstacle. A very few of the shifts put pellets in an oscillation pattern and trajectory that avoids obstacles for a very long distance. There’s no logic, learning, or morality to the pellets, just chance and the environment. Changes that cause a pellet to fly into an obstacle will not be repeated (that flight is ended and can no longer reproduce), while those that lead away from obstacles will have more chances to reproduce, thus increasing the number of pellets with similar patterns/trajectories.
I just realized something njtt, in what you said, and the question popped into my head as I was reading, “Don’t humans do that more than they believe they do?” Don’t people look at what other people do and see how they end up and follow what they believe is the easiest, safest path?" and then GusNSpot brought-up the connection of instincts in people and those of animal mothers. Sure, humans can come up with reasons to justify their actions, but many are just “built-in” the way a man wants to liquify another man’s face that hits on his girl (protective, mating instinct) after all we stand on 2 legs and do our fair share of debating, but we’re really not so different.
I’m really not trying to bring God into this, because any faith even that in science is an added variable to such a discussion. Science admits it’s wrong all the time though. I’m not saying anybody is wrong however. I’m simply rather… err, disappointed that the ultimate theme of this post in responses seems to be, “stuff” happens… and that’s about the size of it. So nothing, really means anything, there is no point in such a tale told. You come into this world and then you die and why you are here was just another random causality.
For a time I suppose I was a bit on the jealous side that animals just act on instincts. So in that way they for the most part always know what they’re doing. But then LSLGuy brought into the discussion that “individual skill at surviving drives towards longer-lasting species” which says that’s it’s not just following some genetic programming, that there is refining and mastering of the skill-sets necessary to be a certain animal. That’s not just instinct then, there is learning and experience and such things can be passed to the young, but in most nature shows I’ve ever watched the mother’s usually leave their off-spring quite quickly to “nature” letting the hard lesson of life be more the teacher.
I guess I wanted to see a point, because to me in allot of cases animals teach ME things; glaringly obvious things. To state that it’s all just a randomized ride from birth to death seems to so undermine the potential human existence.
Yes, of course some learning happens. It’s called evolution. Typically, though, the SDMB flips its shit when someone deigns to even slightly anthropomorphize that particular natural process, so prepare for some mouth frothing in 3…2…1…
bring it on, it isn’t a challenge to anyone. It is search on my part, call it “science” if you want. I’m simply asking questions, there will always be those that have total confidence in their knowledge and not question it. I on the other hand question everything and I understand that might piss some people off… but it’s my search for answers that will shut-up some of the questions in my head and forever bring a new set of them. Who I piss off in the process of my learning has fallen far into the background of my thoughts anymore. I may never get to where I want to be, but if nothing else, “why not try?”
Another less-obvious example, which helps to make the point that those species that just happened to evolve just the right instincts will be more successful: A great many species (meaning, many higher mammal species) have an instinctive fear of heights. I read of an experiment where newborn piglets were placed on a glass table, half of which had been painted black. They were placed on the opaque black part of the table.
If they approached the clear side and saw the floor down below, they stopped and would not walk onto the clear glass. Somehow, newborn piglets, even without any relevant personal experience, “knew” better than to step out there.
All that is needed for the unguided emergence of survival instinct is:
Organisms that have variable behaviour
Some sort of heritability in that behaviour
A ‘sieve’ (usually, but not necessarily environmental) that means some behaviours work better than others
It’s pretty much a truism that behaviours contributing to the long-term survival of individuals tend to persist, and behaviours that contribute to a swift death of indivuduals tend to disappear from the population.
It’s not always that simple - and so we can end up with colony survival strategies, etc.
Another example - Darwin reports that at the Galapagos, the birds were totally unafraid of humans. He reported birds would land on the sailor’s arm and try to drink from the pitcher as he poured a glass of water. They weren’t stupid, they just did not have enemies that looked like humans, so they were not afraid. This same phenomenon is reported in many uninhabited islands in the early days. Even today, jeeps full of tourists are not usually attacked by animals in the Serengeti because those rolling lumps don’t look like enemies or food, and animals are not able to tell it’s a box full of humans (of which they are scared or hungry for).
Subsequent visitors to the Galapagos reported the birds becoming more and more skittish as settlers killed off the less skittish ones, and surviving birds eventually stayed away from humans.
Animals with certain instincts - “be afraid of this” or “eat this” (based on taste) are more likely to have offspring. The pain/pleasure training is the most instructive. There are some behaviours that are “programmed”, in that we don’t need to learn them growing up. Humans have flexible brains, and learn much of their behaviour - but fear of pain and urge to reproduce, among others, are programmed in as a result of this selection. Other animals have much more programmed behaviour - birds that migrate, honeybees following their hive programming, etc.
(You can see an example with leprosy. Lepers lose sensation of touch, stop feeling pain. As a result, they can acquire infections more easily, since the tendency to avoid risks to extremities or to favour infected ones is reduced. This can lead to major problems, especially with hands and fingers, or foot infections crippling them. All because they do not feel pain.)
I once read that the adverse human impact on wildlife movement and behavior in the Arctic was somewhat alleviated with the introduction of the snowmobile. Wildlife reacted to and fled from men on skis or showshoes, but did not recognize the snowmobile as something they associated with a live predator.
I’ve always had greater success birdwatching from my car, and the birds wouldn’t flee until they saw arms and legs coming out the doors.
The skill that was mentioned may or may not derive from genetic programming.
Behaviors that facilitate an organism’s survival/reproduction are passed on to the next generation by one or more means:
In some cases (e.g. primates), some of the behaviors that facilitate an organism’s survival/reproduction are mastered during the early part of their lives while they are under the protection of their parents. If these behaviors are taught by the parent, or learned by observing others of its kind, then they are not instincts; they constitute culture. Certain troops of monkeys, for example, have learned to wash their food before eating it (presumably to get the sand off of it), but other troops of the same species do not exhibit this behavior, indicating that the behavior is not genetically derived. Washing your food may seem like a luxury rather than a utility, but if you can salvage/eat food that would otherwise be inedible, you’ve got a survival advantage.
In other cases, the useful behaviors are informed entirely by genetics. Sea turtles, whose mother is long gone when they finally hatch know, without any prior experience, that their first move should be to head for the ocean. This is an example of instinctive behavior.
From the Wikipedia page on instinct (see link above):
TL,DR: yes, human brains are pretty advanced, so we tend to rely less on instinct and more on culture when it comes to transmitting useful behaviors to the next generation.
Behaviors, whether learned or instinctive, tend to exist because they have proven, over successive generations, to be advantageous for the survival of an individual. It should be immediately obvious that if you have two gazelles - one which runs when he sees a lion, and one which does not - the one that tends to run when he sees a lion is more likely to survive and reproduce, resulting in that same instinctive behavior being manifested in the next generation. Or, to tie back to a previous example - sea turtles that instinctively head away from the ocean upon hatching aren’t likely to survive and pass that behavior on to the next generation.
Weren’t there some experiments with getting people out of smoke filled rooms? Imagine a room with four exits all marked ‘Emergency Exit’ and a small crowd in the centre of the room. An alarm sounds and the room begins to fill with smoke. One individual immediately heads for his nearest exit.
The chances are that most of the rest will follow, even though their best chance of escape (survival) would be through the nearest door. Something makes them follow the guy who looks as if he knows what he is doing.