Be Excellent To Each Other

I know there's a few edu-ma-cated folks around here - I'm looking for some pointers into research papers on how information is passed on genetically.

For example: I was watching Ray Mears earlier and they showed beavers building dams. As far as we know beavers don't have language - and as far as we know don't employ telepathy - so I wondered how the ability to build dams gets passed down the generations and the mechanisms for doing so. I also pondered the apparent absence of this in humans; are skills not passed down the genetic line, our species' success relying on communication to impart knowledge, or are the innate abilities we all posses and which we attribute to "gifts" (such as having a "gift" for mechanical/building skills or more abstract things like mathematics or physics)?

To start, have a Google for social learning, inherited learning, and imitation learning.

As far as beavers go, I imagine the young just mimic the older ones and pick up the knowledge themselves by observation...

I watched Life earlier (which is brillaint btw) and there were snakes that were born in a cave, underwater, but knew to swim to the open sea.... How do they do it???

That would be inherited learning.

If you take a squirrel away from its mother at birth and put it in a cage/box whatever, you can raise it with no social or imitation learning. But give it a nut, and it will scrabble at the floor and try to bury it.

Oh! Another type of learning is imprinting, such as when a chick hatches and you are its mother because you are the first thing it sees. That's based on hormones, and stuff, and is a very short period that is refined by proper learning.

I didn't do that sort of stuff, that's big animals, is that.

Best excuse to Social Services ever.

EoaE - I do wonder why it is that many sorts of animals will have a lot of genetically determined behaviours, and we seem to almost entirely rely on memes (in the original sense) for most behaviours. You take a human child and keep it in a box for several years, what comes out is a psychopath. But, I guess, a psychopath that knows food goes in its mouth.

So we do have genetically determined behaviours which do not need learning, but I guess as we have a much larger spread of behaviour types, most of ours are learned. If we didn't have language and iPods and that, we'd be no different to squirrels.

Specifiacall, what you're asking about is the "nature vs nurture" debate, but that's a fucking big can of worms and stuff. There's some books on it, somewhere, as well. It's a topic to describe which isn't really possible to describe in a forum post. I know a fair few behavioural ecologists, but if i ask them, I'll get loads of really dull stuff back about how they spend their time making pigeons superstitious and stuff.

I knew a neuroscientist phd who spent her time removing pigeons' brains and seeing what they would do with just a brainstem. A surprising amount, as it turned out.

it's that spare capacity that means pigeons are in fact used as data couriers working for the Woodland Alliance, and convey intelligence and movements of undesirable citizens in order to brief the teams of suicide animals who step into the road and cause car crashes, killing the occupants that the Alliance fears most.

Now I've started looking into this (thanks for the Google-Fu Mr. Russell!), another aspect that occurs to me is that there are behaviours/knowledge/skills directly linked to biological function, like a spider's ability to secrete silk-thread and then to spin it into a web, and also behaviours/knowledge/skills that don't seem to have a biological basis - back to Ray Mears again, the program showed a nut which had been placed atop a tree to dry off by a squirrel.

I also wonder if abilities are passed on genetically it ever goes wrong and out in nature are whole colonies of cowboy beavers who build rubbish dams. Perhaps another function of evolution is to weed out the rubbish dam builders/wonky knowledge?

Regarding that last point: certainly. Same as any mutation would affect either the body or the brain. Like a child born with autism for example.

Learning can either be passed on vertically (from parents) or horizontally (from peers).
There is a famous study of some macaques that now wash their potatoes in a nearby river. This behaviour then spread to the wheat grains they ate to separate them from the sand grains.

The males in the group did not take on the washing behaviour, but the new male offspring did, which blurred the lines between human and animal behaviours.

One major factor - conceivably a deciding one, though I know too little to say authoritatatitatively - is that humans are born extremely early on as a result of our large brain size to body size ratio. Human infants are utterly helpless and know nothing but to scream at pretty much every stimulus. Most mammals are born much more developed, including other primates. That's largely why/because we're so gregarious - we've had to be, to raise our spawn effectively - and also why upbringing has such a profound effect on humans when compared to other species.

Relatedly, the last century has seen surgical intervention become all but guaranteed in childbirth in many countries (notably the USA, where arbitrary pointless procedures mean arbitrary pointless purchases for the hospital's owner). So, babies' heads are getting larger, but thanks to this intervention, womens' hips aren't getting any wider. Uh oh!

I have a slightly faulty cat which, every time it is fed, usually spends a few minutes trying to dig up the kitchen floor in order to bury it. By which time the other cat has eaten the food.

Yes, I read that in that Science of Discworld Book and just this second remembered. I'm pretty sure that it does indeed have a massive effect on the degree we rely on society for passing on behaviour. Still, though, babies do have instinctive behaviours, such as sucking.

The idea of genetically determined behaviours is, for some reason, quite unsettling to me.

Heh, yes.

"Your Honour, my client denies murder but admits manslaughter on the grounds his karotype defines he's more than likely a serial killer"

"No worries, cobber"

It's true: Babies are rubbish. I don't know if that's strictly speaking a behaviour rather than a quality, though.

And branch-grabbing. And "walking".

The first episode of "Life" showed some monkeys bashing open some nut or other, and they said that they take a good 6 years to be able to learn to do it properly (ie letting it dry for some days before bashing it, using the right type of hammer rock, placing it in the right place on the anvil rock and so on)

Malc

What does the bible say?

*runs*

If anyone is actually properly interested in this to the point of wanting to buy books, I will recommend a couple when I get home tomorrow.

You may not be surprised to learn that this is what I did for my degree to a part.

Recommend away - I'd be very interested.