RufusAtticus

Instincts aren't learned, they are instinct.

Peez

:notworthy

Peez

ps418

As Rufus said, instincts are not learned. However, there is a sense in which you are correct. I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but its interesting nonetheless.

One type of behavior pattern that has been widely thought of as instinctual in the past is fear-avoidance behavior in reponse to other animals, particularly predators, is now known to involve both learning and an innate predisposition to develop the behavioral response only in response to particular stimuli.

For instance, rhesus monkies are not born with fear of snakes. They do not freak out at the sight of plastic snakes, for instance. But if they observe other monkies reacting with fear to snakes, they quickly learn to react with fear and avoidance behavior themselves. Experiments have been done (Cook and Mineka, 1989) to see if you can trick them to develop the same response to rabbits and flowers and so on, but the young monkies don't learn to fear the flowers or rabbits. In other words, the monkies are not born with an "instinctual" fear, but they have an innate predisposition to develop fear responses to certain specific stimuli. As an example, check out the PDF file below.

Cook and Mineka, 1989. Observational Conditioning of Fear to Fear-Relevant Versus Fear-Irrelevant Stimuli in Rhesus Monkeys. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 98, 448-459.

Griffin et al, 2002. Selective Learning in a Marsupial. Ethology 108, 1103—1114.

Patrick

Non-praying Mantis

(sung to the tune of Three Blind Mice)

One half-blind cytologist,
one half-blind cytologist,
breeding the mice,
breeding the mice.
He cut off their tails with a scapel blade,
to see if tail-less offspring they made,
but Weismann's barrier their genes obeyed
for one half-blind cytologist.

NPM

theyeti

I think it's driven by ideology, just like the other IDists. Instead of the far right-wing ideology coming from the DI, the neo-Lamarkians are beholden to a far left-wing ideology. If Darwinian evolution is a fact, so the reasoning goes, then a marxist/anarchist society in which everyone is equal kind of goes out the window. It necessitates the people are born differently and have different potentials, and that competition for resources is the natural way of things. Hence, a completely egalitarian society will never exist in the absence of a coercive state. If you read mturner's posts (if you can stand them) it's Mendelian genetics that really gets his panties in a bunch. If organisms (most importantly people) can pass on acquired characters, then no one person or lineage can be considered "inferior" and destined to lose, and thus you can have true equality. AFAICT, this is the exact same reasoning that led to Lysenkoism. So it's basically a backlash to Social Darwinism writ large, yet they make the same mistake that the social darwinists made, which is the naturalistic fallacy. This is the sort of thing that Richard Lewontin (who's pretty far left) was getting at in his book, Biology as Ideology?. While Lewontin attacks the notion that Darwinian evolution negates particular ideological views (with a mixture of good and bad reasoning IMO -- his dismissal of evolutionary psychology is pretty lame), the left-wing IDists take things one step further and attack Darwinian evolution itself. It's really no different than how theologians attack the idea that natural evolution negates religion -- and any cultural mores derived from it -- yet the right-wing IDists just go whole-hog and attack natural evolution.

So for the right-wingers, the important thing seems to be that evolution (or "creation") is non-natural, and thus provides evidence of God. For the left-wing IDists, the important thing seems to be that there is something beyond mere RM&NS, and thus life can be interpreted as being devoid of brutal competition for which meaningless "luck" is the arbiter of success. Both groups rely heavily on gaps in current knowledge, and of course the usual misrepresentations, straw-men, outright falsehoods, etc. But whereas the right-wing types tend to focus on anthropomorphic "design" (to go along with their anthropomorphic designer), the left-wing types tend to rely more on vague, quasi-mystical explanations that couldn't be refuted even if you knew what they were talking about.

I don't know why, but for some reason I've found that I dislike the left-wing IDists even more so than the right-wing IDists. Of course they both suck.

theyeti

lpetrich

I think that there were other reasons for Lysenkoism, like:

* Currying favor with the Party by saying how Marxist he was. This extended all the way to Joseph Stalin himself, who agreed with Lysenko about heredity.

* Claiming to do a much better job at producing improved crop-plant varieties than mainstream geneticists, who had this perverse taste for crossbreeding fruit flies.

The Lone Ranger

I think you hit the nail right on the head.

There was an interesting article in Reason not long ago which claimed that most influential, well-educated people on the political Right (i.e., people like William F. Buckley) can't possibly be so ignorant as to actually believe in Creationism, but they often write as if they're sympathetic to it, since this helps keep their constituency happy.

By contrast, a lot of influential people in the political Left hate the very concept of natural selection with a poisonous intensity, for exactly the reasons you've outlined above.

It's a frightening world we live in, sometimes.

Cheers,

Michael

Wounded King

Dear Rufus,

I cant quite make out what it is you and Ipetrich disagree on during development. Ipetrich says that germ cells are 'put aside' early in development and you say that somatic cells are, I follow it that far. What I cant see is quite what the distinction is, you are both saying that the somatic cell line and the germ cell line are segregated 'early' in development.

How early this actually is varies, in insects the localisation of the germ plasm in the oocyte could be taken as a crude segregation even before the egg is fertilised. In mice on the other hand the germ cell line is only segregated as a result of differential gene expression, much as any other tissue would be, and even then not until 6.5 days post coitum only shortly before gastrulation.

Perhaps if exactly what is meant by 'put aside' was made more explicit things would be easier. As far as I can make out Ipetrich is simply pointing out that plants have sexual organs, and consequently germ cells, developing from somatic tissues at various times whereas the segregation in animals is a one off early in development which you then seemed to agree with but wanted to make some strange distinction between somatic cells being segregated from germ cells and germ cells being segregated from somatic cells.

Is there something I was missing that would make this diagreement make sense?

Thanks,

Wounded