I'm not sure I understand the proposed mechanisms by which a complex behavior in a species becomes instinct. Anyone have any insight?

Myth #1 in animal biology is that instinct is "handy knowledge things are born with". It's not. Even dictionary.com basically gives this as its first definition, pffft.

 

Instinct is basically a simple learned behaviour, like pulling your hand away from intense heat, but it doesn't need prior experience of the stimulus in order to generate the final response.

 

"Built in" functions such as breathing are innate behaviours and can actually get quite complex depending on the species in question. I'm not entirely sure how they get passed on but I'd imagine it's neural loops created by the genetics of the organism.

Originally posted by Sayonara³

Myth #1 in animal biology is that instinct is "handy knowledge things are born with". It's not.

 

Instinct is basically a simple learned response, like pulling your hand away from intense heat.

 

"Built in" functions such as breathing are innate behaviours and can actually get quite complex depending on the species in question. I'm not entirely sure how they get passed on but I'd imagine it's neural loops created by the genetics of the organism.

 

Yea, I used the wrong word But you got my drift. I was thinking "neureal loops" as well, but it seemed a bit of a stretch.

We could try working through an example by starting with first principles.

 

Choose carefully though - baby alligators squeaking is pretty easy, but salmon spawning behaviour - which is 'time delayed' - is a whole other kettle of fish.

 

Boom boom.

Don't wanna be too picky here, but one of the definitions of an instinctive behaviour is that it doesn't require learning (another is that it is universal within the species). The withdrawal reflex isn't an instinctive behaviour, it's a ...well...reflex. It works via a reflex arc (interneurons) between the dorsal (afferent) and ventral (efferent) roots in the spinal cord, independantly of higher neural systems. The spawning salmon thing is a good example of an instinctive behaviour.

 

I suppose instinctit could be described as an innate (hard wired) propensity to perform particular patterns of behaviour in response to particular stimuli. e.g. if you cut out a cardboard silhouette that is ambiguous but roughly shaped like a goose, it looks pretty like a hawk if you move it in reverse (the long neck becomes the tail of a hawk, and the short tail of the goose becomes the head of a hawk). If you move the cut-out long-neck first over baby birds, they will ignore it. If you move the same cut-out but reversed (so the neck becomes the tail) over the baby birds, they will fall to the bottom of the nest and freeze. This is a hard wired (unlearned) response to a particular stimulus (a moving silhouette, resembling the basic form of an airborn predator).

but how exactly are these behaviors hard-wired? also how much of the behavior of an adult organism is there by instinct and how much by learning? take say specific examples- an insect, a lower vertebrate(say salmon), a mammal(lion), and a primate or a dolphin?