People say 'instinct' by never mention what that means or how it works :-P
For spiders then there is an action pattern that upon certain stimulus they will use their spinnerets begin forming a web, first placing anchor points and gradually building it up with radial threads and spiral. The exact behavior differs by species such that they have different resulting patterns. It seems possible that there is an element of 'learning' beyond the basic pattern as well, even in seemingly very simple animals.
I doubt the spiders have a mental model of what their web looks like as such, it's more evolutionary driven genetic behavior, a particular neuronal pattern encoding the action sequence rather than an underlying fundamental understanding.
>For spiders then there is an action pattern that upon certain stimulus they will use their spinnerets begin forming a web, first placing anchor points and gradually building it up with radial threads and spiral.
I can sorta understand stimulus causing them to start making a web (sorta like stimulating a mammary can cause lactation) - but how do it 'know' to use a radial pattern rather then ah-hoc mess the black widows on my porch make? The 'ad-hoc' pattern seems like it would be more 'likely' then a nice pattern? Overall, I guess it just seems like a rather complex pattern/behavior?
Also, I guess I have a more basic question of 'what is instinct' if its not some sort of 'memory'? People seem to have an 'instinct' of the mechanics of throwing a ball, yet we have wildly different abilities with regards to accuracy, 'form', distance/speed (due to muscalture?) - it just seems like we have an 'instinct' for the 'simple' mechanical movements but not for the more complex behavior like throwing a ball to hit a target ?
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And the more complex the behavior the more it blows my mind :-D
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Thanks for the link below - it was pretty neat :-D
I think throwing a ball is more learned, although some behaviors like grasping the ball may provided a fixed action foundation on which higher order learning builds. Baby humans have a grasp reflex that works in a similar way to the fixed action pattern described, but with a simpler action sequence. If you touch the palm of a toddler, they will instinctively tightly grasp. It's interesting that the grasp reflex disappears around 5 years old, so the fixed neuronal pattern is subsumed by higher order learned behavior.
Thats where I get stuck..the 'behavior' has to account for different sizes of webs (the spider might be in a tight space, or a more open space), etc.
That just seems like an incredibly complex behavior to encode...Cells are supposedly 'simple' organisms but they manage to create/manage such complex behaviors...it's mind blowing..
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A chaotic web is a sign that the black widow spider is well fed and not hungry.
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In any case here's a discussion of said paper.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/death-tra....
My guess: It "just feels right".
In the beginning (?), the species didn't have any "preference" and just did whatever. Some species cut the pizza in circles (as in, cutting out a circle from inside the pizza, leaving a donut-shaped pizza), others cut squares, others cut weird shapes, etc. All over the place.
Over time, those predisposed to cutting the pizza in a straight line, from border to border, passing through the center, began to survive slightly longer than the rest (for some unknown reason), becoming the dominant predisposition. To anyone born since then, it just felt right to cut the pizza that way. Not passing through the center of the pizza was just weird. And stopping a cut midway, without going all the way through, was also just weird.
At that point the amount of cuts still varied though, so it was all over the place. Some cut it in half, other made 2 cuts (4 slices) but they were in ugly 20° angles (so 2 huge slices and 2 small slices), others made hundreds of cuts so each piece was tiny and was annoying to eat, stuff like that.
Over time, those who preferred to cut the pizza in 90° angles started to survive slightly longer, and over time became the dominant predisposition.
And so on and so on. With these learnings it was becoming easier for people to make pizza ("find food"). Pizza sizes increased, and so did the amount of people sharing a single pizza. Making it easier to attract others, and share a pizza with them. Meeting more people makes it slightly more likely to find a life partner.
Time passed, same old song and dance. Now all pieces must be symmetrical. It was the most fair way to share. Not doing it this way meant the one doing the cuts was evil and must be avoided.
Current situation: Most people cut the pizza in 8 equal-ish slices because it just feels right to do it that way. Those who don't do it that way might still reproduce, but are slightly more likely to be avoided because they are weirdos. They are also slightly less able to get food, because nobody wants to share their pizza with those weirdos, so they are slightly more likely to starve due to being unable to "attract" food.
In that parallel universe, someone named 224hcem asks:
> But how do they "know" to cut the pizza in 8 equal slices rather than the ad-hoc mess the teenagers next door make with their microwaved pizza? Overall it's way more effort to try to make all pieces nice and equal, and the movements have to be more precise meaning the brain calculations are more complex compared to just winging it.
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This is fascinating stuff.
>Is it possible that these are based on inherited memories, patterns, insticts of dinosaurs?
It is possible that these are based, at least in part, on the discovery of dinosaur fossils, but humans didn't even evolve until the dinosaurs were long dead. So even if it were possible for "inherited memory" to include visual memories it wouldn't do so for dinosaurs.
It doesn't seem likely that whatever primitive mammalian ancestor eventually evolved into primates, and then into humans, carried within it a coherent enough visual and behavioral memory of dinosaurs to have survived so many generations of mutation, eventually informing the modern idea of "dragons" as winged reptiles.
And again, it isn't even true that there is a cross-cultural concept of "dragons" to begin with. It's a eurocentric myth, in that it assumes a Western concept of a "dragon" to be the default, and ignores any other cultural context in order to fit their mythologies into that mold.
The first is direct. In order for this to happen there must be a stable representation of the input and output. In this case, bright colors must have a stable representation, and fear must have a stable representation. This gives the opportunity for neurons to know how to connect the two so that one leads to the other. How does the individual neuron do that? The body is full of chemical gradients and they function kind of similar to landmarks that can be used for navigation by the growing neuron.
The second is indirect. In this case there is nothing directly encoding the connection between brightness and fear, instead due to factors of the brain structure and the environment the animal exists in it is highly likely to learn the association. For instance the low-level visual processing and fear processing areas of the brain may be almost but not quite wired up. Now there may be a common insect that is brightly colored and just a little bit poisonous. Due to the innate curiousity the animal will try to eat the insect and get an upset stomach. The dormant connection is then molded to associate these two things.
Have you never been afraid of spiders or snakes?
https://www.cbs.mpg.de/Fear-of-spiders-and-snakes-is-deeply-...
>>and thus can learn some things("instinctual behaviour") easier than others
I don't understand this - Isn't 'instinctual behaviour' something you don't have to learn? Also, I wonder if there's a limit to how complex a behavior can be 'encoded'? like bright colored animals == poisonous. That requires being able to tell a say a toad from a bird, what a color is, what colors = poison, etc? That seems like a pretty complex behavior...Do we have any idea what the limit is for complex behaviors in genes?
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AFAIK the current explanations for this often involve electrical and chemical gradients, along with "timer" cyclic reactions among groups of cells.
A contrived example: Suppose the first progenitor cell buds off two children, where one is set to be "Emit Head signals, flee from Tail signals" and the other is "Emit Tail molecules, flee from Head molecules". These two daughter-lines promptly zip off in opposite directions, and now there's a kind of chemical Head-to-Tail measure in the middle for differently-calibrated cells to arrange themselves on.
Then it buds off some cells that are tuned to create a line in-between the two poles, and those cells generate/follow a certain chemical "beat" in order to subdivide, and if the beat lasts X cycles they create X striped zones, which might become chunks of a spine...
I always think of some lil control room going "ok..we need a heart and 2 lungs...send out the heart signals, and send out 2 lung signals" (electrical or chemical or whatever the signals are)
Just amazing such 'simple' organisms manage to co-ordinate all this stuff...
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There's also this parody video of Despacito [1] that may be, er, educationally amusing.
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Also, humans don't instinctively understand that fire can be dangerous, so there's that.
I didn't realize people don't have an instinct about fire. I always thought kids touching hot stoves/fire was because their hands touched it before their brains registered 'hot! ouch!'