“Instinct” means the contribution of genetics to behavior. Both genetics and environment contribute to most behavior. Twin studies are the gold standard that give us the controls to do rigorous statistical analysis of this.
At eighteen months, my granddaughter encountered tanks of live crabs and lobsters for the first time in a grocery store - and would not go near them. She would also hide in a safe place when she needed to poop.
I think about the best we could do would be to look for traits that seem to show up in families. On the Italian side of my family over several generations there seems to be a strong tendency toward agoraphobia. They don’t like leaving their homes. I see lots of traits on both sides of my family that seem to occur with a very high frequency.
Not at first:
Babies who have yet to walk will often show remarkable climbing skills, it appears to be instinctual.
My son between 1-2yo has met my friend’s decent size (2m long) pet snakes and had no fear of them at all.
He did start hiding under tables to poop but I guessed that was a learned rather than instinctual behaviour since everyone else appears to go and hide to do poops
I saw a Scientific American article where they had a test area about 8x8 feet painted in a large checkerboard pattern. Half the box the pattern was painted on the floor, the other half there was a four foot drop and the cliff and distant floor were painted with the same B&W checkers (as were all the walls). The higher floor continued across as a piece of solid glass. Not only babies, but puppies and kittens and a number of other youngster animals were unwilling to step out onto the glass. The conclusion was that the perception (and fear) of heights was instinctual in a wide range of creatures; but perhaps for the people who anecdotally say their babies were able and willing to do head-plops (“It’s a great trick, but I can only do it once…”), the problem was a lack of perception of depth of the scenery or inability to grasp that the same grip going up may not hold going down?
The lil’wrekker was born tongue tied…they clipped it well before she was making intentional sounds…when she started chattering and mimicing us…we had her in speech therapy and the therapist gave us homework ,we were told to face a mirror with her in her looking too…and say familiar words…like names and objects…as it worked out she spoke words and sentences really early. (She spoke plainly the word ‘medicine’ at 7 mos.) We thought she was surely a genius child prodigy…but the therapist said it was pure instinct ,all babies have a need to communicate any way they are able…that is why you can teach very young babies sign language also…
Seeding the floor with Cheerios is an instinct in children. My 9 grandchildren and 7 grandchildren are my cite.
GQ part of my answer: Steven Pinker makes a really compelling case that language is an instinct in humans. He shows that, in communities with immigrants from many places, it only takes a generation to go from a pidgin (a non-syntactic mix of various languages) to a creole (a fully functional language with syntax). He has other examples as well, but that one really stuck with me.
IMHO part: I think throwing is an instinct, catching is not. Monkeys and other primates throw things, and babies do, too. But, did you ever watch a small kid try and catch something? They are terrible at it. Meanwhile, dogs, dolphins, and seals catch things out of the air with ease. My conjecture is that it has to do with how we all hunted. Humans have been hunting by throwing things for millennia, whereas wolves, for example, probably have to catch their prey on the run, which is similar to catching things in the air. Same with dolphins and seals, catching fish fish in motion in the water is analogous to catching something in the air.
There is an uncontrollable instinct that is only displayed in adulthood in females.
The magical release of milk from a mothers breast justby the sound of the baby crying. Mothers have stated they have no control over the milk coming out of the breast it just flows as if by instinct.
It’s true about recognizing faces. Babies start doing that as soon as they open their eyes. I forget exactly how long it takes to recognize mom’s (or whoever they see most), but it’s a very short period (hours to a couple days, somewhere in there). So I would say that recognizing faces is an instinct; it’s hardwired into our brains.
And I believe for voices (especially mom’s, of course) recognition starts in the womb.
Children without a language model spontaneously create language. It’s really rare when it happens involving children who can hear, but it happens with Deaf children all the time. Deaf children whose parents don’t expose them to a standard signed language make one up.
Here’s something more interesting. Children have language “rules” inborn. If a child has an incorrect role model, they correct it. Children who have parents have a speech impediment never pick it up, but even more interestingly, Deaf children in a signed English program, even a “pure” one, with no children of Deaf parents, or children who had previously been exposed to ASL in Deaf schools, correct the signed English, which is to say, that when they are signing among themselves without a hearing person present, modify the way they sign to make it more like a signed language, and less like English.
Even when children who are still learning their native language make grammar mistakes, what they say may be a mistake in their language, but it is always correct in some language. In other words, if a child misplaces a modifier, for example, they will shift it to a position that is correct in some language, not to an impossible position. It’s as though children are born with all the rules for language, and it’s a process of dropping the ones that don’t belong to their native language.
That’s another thing about child-created language features, or even whole systems. They never have bizarre features. They always follow the same basic rules all languages follow. For example, it’s a general rule of all languages that voiced consonants imply voiceless ones, and no child-created system will break this rule.
Eating when hungry and drinking when thirsty are both instincts. Sexual attraction is an instinct. Many facial expressions are instinctive (smiling, frowning, the looks of pain, anger and disgust), as is the ability to understand these expressions in others (no one has to teach you what an angry face means). There seems to be an instinctive attractions to certain things in nature, such as flowers and bodies of water. We don’t have to be taught that certain smells are disgusting.
In order to call an action an instinct, it must be demonstrated in 100% of the population. At every opportunity.
While some have stated the suckling response is an instinct, there have been cases where it was never expressed.
According to my 1980’s psychology professor humans have no instincts.
If instincts must be demonstrated in 100% of the population, then no instincts exist. Cite for its need to be present 100% of the time?
I think I’ll stick with the hard science community of instinct, rather than a psychologist’s interpretation of it. I.e. an inborn pattern of activity or tendency to action common to a given biological species. Humans have them.
This is all fantastic, but I don’t think language can be instinct. It might be instinctual to grunt meaningfully, but that is not language.
Several weeks ago I got swarmed by yellowjackets. I grunted a lot in very instinctual ways, but it wasn’t language.
One of the most difficult things to learn, in any language, is the irregularities; it is, in fact, one of the errors that are still frequent in older children or even adults whose command of the language is otherwise complete. They’re difficult precisely because they break the rules.
nachtmusick, RivkahChaya isn’t talking about random grunts. She’s talking about languages with actual structure, syntax, grammar. Who do you think taught the first human to speak?
Humans surpassed instinct and developed speech. Or so we presume…instinct remains.
The current science, I believe, disagrees with you. Another example is Nicaraguan sign language:
Pinker mentions this in that book as well. Nicaragua placed their deaf children basically in a camp and they invented a fully syntactic language, unrelated to Spanish, in short order. It was different than the language they used with their teachers, which was mostly lipreading and finger spelling Spanish words. Read the wiki article – to me, it points strongly towards language being instinctual.