Where do animal instincts come from?

gruntlabor said:
:)
1. As far as I know, female dogs do not hump although, when a female is in season, she certainly is receptive.
2. I never said that men think aggression, creativity and horniness are the same thing. That is merely what I personally assert.
3. Question: That explains what even better?
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Let’s just agree to disagree at this point.
I’m ok with that. 😊
 

bobcat48 said:
Okay, how does anyone really know when a dog feels horny. Okay, maybe a dog priest, and that's assuming the dog goes to doggie confession.
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Dang, Bobcat. Simple! I mean, he shows you he feels horny by humping. We will never need a dog priest to know what a dog is thinking. He tells us Every. Single. Time he thinks, Lord love 'em all..
 
gruntlabor said:
Dang, Bobcat. Simple! I mean, he shows you he feels horny by humping. We will never need a dog priest to know what a dog is thinking. He tells us Every. Single. Time he thinks, Lord love 'em all..
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Well, to be fair, he is only showing you his behavior. The rest is our interpretation of it. Some dogs that have been neutered for years still hump, so I don't know. This is way over my pay grade to make any call.
 
One can read lists of specific human instincts some psychologists argue for but most are too interconnected with experience and knowledge to term them instincts. However our bodies and minds are clearly structured to support the three below.

  • For all higher multicellular Earth animal life (but not plants) including we Earth monkeys, especially higher order animals, the greatest instinct is survival, to live. No animal chooses to die before its time with most displaying enormous effort to avoid death if threatened so.
  • Humans as intelligent entities that benefit from the collective knowledge of others also have social instincts that are regularly necessary for survival unlike some solitary species that only congregate for mating like a clam in the sand.
  • Humans also have mating instincts for the benefit of our species.

As to how lower animal minds are able to accomplish instinctual behaviors, one will need some general understanding about the physical nature of brains. Evolution evolved brains in animals as internal mental model representations of their external environments that they could then sense and given executive control pilots, could then act upon for their advantage and benefit. Most people probably think when we use our senses, we are directly sensing the external world and environments but such is not true as such is an illusion.

For instance our awareness of vision is not in our eyes but rather in the occipital cortex a brain creates a model of. That is why our senses our mapped into a cortical homunculus that by amount of tissue looks like a distorted representation of our bodies. The distortion is relative to how much each sense or motor element has gray matter in the cortex. When one "feels" a touch to their little toe pinkie toe, such is not actually being felt there but rather the skin sense nerves connecting through other brain mechanisms ends up reaching the toe homunculus location that the aware controlling part of mind focuses on and experiences that illusion as real. A neuroscience researcher directly activating the same homunculus toe input location will cause the person to falsely feel their toe is being touched. During dreams, the sense inputs to humunculus areas are blocked and instead our minds directly connect to the parallel inputs of the internal model. That is why dreams seem so real because that is where our brains normally experience such. That is why when one thinks about feeling their little toe without actually touching it they can as memory also connect so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus

As babies, the human brain has 300 million cortical columns that are initially in a default mostly unconnected default state with tendencies to connect to other columns. Given years of growing towards adulthood aging and experience, they connect up via neural plasticity. We in effect make what we become by experience and chosen activity. That is why the old narrative of IQ dominance has been severely demoted. Now if those tendencies of cortical columns are enhanced before birth in DNA structured ways via natural selection processes, that can become instinct because there is little difference between an inherent structure and one that has been developed through experiences and actions.
 
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JustDave said:
The seeds don't know how to do that, but they do it anyway. Now apply that to birds and nest building. It may seem like an oversimplified comparison, but both of those examples are quite complicated at the DNA level.
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Scientifically, we're all made of energy molecules. Some are complex and some are simple. The DNA of a plant is programmed to repeat the same pattern over and again. Sometimes, it goes wrong and you get weird vegetables, flowers or fruits.

A bird part of the Aves family has a different program of DNA. So, it's kind of saying, they're born with the ability to fly (lucky!) and to create the most intricate designs for their nest. It's fascinating indeed, but their brains are so small and delicate, I don't believe we'll ever find out how it works.

At the end of the day, I guess we'll have to remain wondering... Why some people are lovely whereas others are born killers?

There Science can check and study...
 
Supernatural said:
At the end of the day, I guess we'll have to remain wondering... Why some people are lovely whereas others are born killers?

There Science can check and study...
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I think this may be one of the things in biology like the human brain. We know about neurons and chemical impulses and which parts of the brain do what, but how all this transforms into images and thoughts remains a mystery. People talk about the new findings in neurology, and we applaud at how far we have come. But it seems to me we have but barely scratched the surface.

The same with DNA, we have cracked the Human genome, and we know what parts of the ladder effect this and that, and we know how DNA (or is it RNA) is used by cells to build and replace what parts that are worn out, but how all this comes together to create instincts and the shape of our noses is still to be learned. It seems like understanding the most important part of the process is still out there.
 
JustDave said:
I think this may be one of the things in biology like the human brain. We know about neurons and chemical impulses and which parts of the brain do what, but how all this transforms into images and thoughts remains a mystery. People talk about the new findings in neurology, and we applaud at how far we have come. But it seems to me we have but barely scratched the surface.

The same with DNA, we have cracked the Human genome, and we know what parts of the ladder effect this and that, and we know how DNA (or is it RNA) is used by cells to build and replace what parts that are worn out, but how all this comes together to create instincts and the shape of our noses is still to be learned. It seems like understanding the most important part of the process is still out there.
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Yes dear, I agree! We're only scratching the surface, there's so much more to discover. All the good bits (and bad ones) are yet to come👍
 
Judycat said:
Cat looking out window: Stupid dog. Stupid dog. Stupid dog.

Cat sees another cat: Grr there's Chauncey. Hey Chauncey, you jerk, come in here and walk like that! We'll see how tough you are then! What kind of name is Chauncey anyway! Your fur is stupid too!

35 seconds later: Stupid dog. Stupid dog. Yum bird! Stupid dog.
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Dear Judycat,
I love this! I have plotted its heist, and bolted with it and it is mine now. (sob) I am most awfully sorry, but not sorry enough to give it back.
Tearfully yours,
Your adoring fan,
 

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