how do animals know what to do?

Question

humans learn from the behavior of others... but animals often dont have that luxury - i'm having a hard time believing that its written in their dna. thoughts? knowing danger, or when/how to have sex, or to know to build nests, to know to bring food to the queen been/ant.. when they dont have examples they seem to know what to do anyway...... HOW?! :P

define instinct; i do not believe it to be of the realm of the supernatural. educated, analytical information i can understand... and i dont think dna tells them where or when to put their parts. (or like a black widow -when to eat one's mate)

Answer 1

Inherent instinct ,coaching by its mother and of course with experience.The animal's survival depends on all the three.
It won't survive long in the absence any one of the above.

Answer 2

Does not your hormone, testosterone, influence what you do? That is genetically mediated. A great number of animals learn as well as have fixed action patterns. Take a baby duck. It has an imprinting mechanism that is a fixed action rule, mediated by a whole suite of genes. Sight, sound, smell; they all fit into the reaction, but the duck will imprint the first organism it sees, after it breaks the shell. DNA codes fer proteins, but those proteins can be active enzymes that speed reactions. They can be behavioral producing hormones and, in concert, they seem to hold strategies of behavior.

PS It is incorrect to hold instinct dichotomous to learning.

Answer 3

Instinct - it's behavior that's "hard-wired" into the brain, rather than learned. Humans have a few - like the ability to suckle at birth, or the tendency of an newborn to grasp anything that is placed in its palm, or take a "step" when held in an upright position.

Answer 4

learned behavior isn't a "luxury" at all...just because animals don't have to go to grade school doesn't mean they're not picking things up from each other. mammals and birds (i.e., where the parents raise the offspring for at least a while before they go off on their own) most definitely have a formal *learning* period while their parents are taking care of them. predatory animals learn to hunt at some point in this time, birds learn to fly, herbivores learn what to eat and what to avoid... many very important social & practical skills are learned behaviors. for a specific example, monkeys that were separated from their mothers at a very young age and then bottle-raised tend to be very poor mothers themselves because they simply don't know how to do it.

learning continues via experiences throughout the life of an animal, just like it does in people. if a rat eats something that makes it feel sick, it will avoid that substance for the rest of its life, even if it is starving. if you reward your dog for sitting when you give the command, it learns to associate doing the behavior with getting a treat, and will continue to do so.

when scientists talk about behaviors being "written in the dna" of an organism, it's a shorthand way of describing a very complex system. your dna (and theirs) gets transcribed to rna, which codes for proteins. different proteins make up the cellular machinery, provide channels between cells to talk, are released as a product of the cell (like hair), are released as chemical messengers to the whole body, etc etc etc.

sometimes these proteins are stored in little packets in the cells until they are needed...imagine the rush of feeling when you are suddenly frightened by something: some stimulus has triggered your adrenal glands to release their little packets of adrenaline, which has rushed to all your muscles to prepare you for fight or flight. as a human, you rationalize what's going on, and consciously decide what to do. animals DON'T rationalize, since they lack the ability to reason through things like people do. if you were a little mouse or some other prey-type animal, you would run like hell. if you were a big tough bear, you might just get mad and take a swing at what startled you.

sometimes, changes in the body regulate the amount of any given protein being produced. for example, when it is time for a female animal to go into heat, the parts of her dna that code for sex hormones are up-regulated so that these are produced in greater quantity, which results in the behavior pattern of sexual receptivity. male animals respond to this with their own hormone cascade, resulting in mating behaviors. even at this point, learning and experience still play a big part: i've seen virgin male rabbits & dogs attempt to mount the female's head or the side of her body. it takes them a while to figure out exactly what to do.

ants & bees are their own unique little systems. there's a lot of research still being done on the "hive mentality" of social insects. do a google or wikipedia search to get more info on their behavior triggers.

Answer 5

Instinct and survival of the fittest.

Some behaviour is not learned, babies at birth are tested to know how to suckle either the breast or bottle. At 3 minutes of age who teaches them that. Instinct to put it simple, is having an itch and knowing to scratch it makes it stop.

Answer 6

Their ansestors and instincts I knew that in 2nd grade not the sex but animals instincts

Answer 7

many of the things the animals do are sheer instinct. this is especially true of lower animals. but higher animals particularly vertebrates learn many things in their life from experience and also 4m each other

Answer 8

their instinct. they just naturally know what to do. its built into them, its natural. like when do u know u want food? ur hungry. When u wanna 'breed/mate'..

Answer 9

animals are like humans.they know they need to survive with wn ideas.

Answer 10

Instinct is the inherent disposition of a living organism toward a particular behavior. Instincts are generally inherited patterns of responses or reactions to certain kinds of stimuli. In humans they are most easily observed in behaviors such as emotions, sexual drive, and other bodily functions, as these are largely biologically determined. Instinct provides a response to external stimuli, which moves an organism to action, unless overridden by intelligence, which is creative and more versatile. Since instincts take generations to adapt, an intermediate position, or basis for action, is served by memory, which provides individually stored successful reactions built upon experience. The particular actions performed may be influenced by learning, environment and natural principles. Generally, the term instinct is not used to describe an existing condition or established state.

Examples can more frequently be observed in the behavior of animals (most in the less intelligent species), which perform various activities (sometimes complex) that are not based upon prior experience, such as reproduction, and feeding among insects. Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, internal escape functions, and building of nests.

It is debatable whether or not living beings are bound absolutely by instinct. Though instinct is what seems to come naturally or perhaps with heredity, general conditioning and environment surrounding a living being play a major role. Predominately, instinct is pre-intellectual, while intuition is trans-intellectual.

Technically speaking, any event that initiates an instinctive behavior is termed a key stimulus (KS). Key stimuli in turn lead to innate releasing mechanisms (IRM), which in turn produce fixed action patterns (FAP). More than one key stimuli may be needed to trigger a FAP. Sensory receptor cells are critical in determining the type of FAP which is initiated. For instance, the reception of pheromones through nasal sensory receptor cells may trigger a sexual response, while the reception of a "frightening sound" through auditory sensory receptor cells may trigger a fight or flight response. The neural networks of these different sensory cells assist in integrating the signal from many receptors to determine the degree of the KS and therefore produce an appropriate degree of response. Several of these responses are determined by carefully regulated chemical messengers called hormones. The endocrine system, which is responsible for the production and transport of hormones throughout the body, is made up of many secretory glands that produce hormones and release them for transport to target organs. Specifically in vertebrates, neural control of this system is funneled through the hypothalamus to the anterior and posterior pituitary gland. Whether or not the behavioral response to a given key stimuli is either learned, genetic, or both is the center of study in the field of behavioural genetics. Researchers use techniques such as inbreeding and knockout studies to separate learning and environment from genetic determination of behavioral traits. And humans as a matter of speaking have no instincts past the early stages of infancy. Instinct should not be confused with responses that an organism is born with such as breathing, hunger, sex drive etc. These are no different than sight, aural ability, tactility or taste perception.

Instinctive behavior can be demonstrated across much of the broad spectrum of animal life, down to bacteria that propel themselves toward beneficial substances, and away from repellent substances. According to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, a favorable trait, such as an instinct, will be selected for through competition and improved survival rate of life forms possessing the instinct. Thus, for evolutionary biology, instincts can be explained in terms of behaviors that favor survival.

A good example of an immediate instinct for certain types of bird is imprinting. This is the behaviour that causes geese to follow around the first moving object that they encounter, as it tends to be their mother. Much work was done on this concept by the psychologist Konrad Lorenz. Evolution however encourages multiple instincts, exampled by the recent case of birds in England flying east for the winter, the result being that because of global warming these birds are now surviving at very high rates, further encouraging this behavior. They return home earlier after winter, get the best breeding grounds, encouraging more breeding by them than other birds, even further encouraging this instinct. In 1896, James Mark Baldwin offered up "a new factor in evolution" through which acquired characteristics could be indirectly inherited. This "new factor" was termed phenotypic plasticity: the ability of an organism to adjust to its environment during the course of its lifetime. An ability to learn is the most obvious example of phenotypic plasticity, though other examples are the ability to tan with exposure to the sun, to form a callus with exposure to abrasion, or to increase muscle strength with exercise. In addition, Baldwin pointed out that, among other things, the new factor could explain punctuated equilibria. Over time, this theory became known as the Baldwin effect.

The Baldwin effect functions in two steps. First, phenotypic plasticity allows an individual to adjust to a partially successful mutation, which might otherwise be utterly useless to the individual. If this mutation adds to inclusive fitness, it will succeed and proliferate in the population. Phenotypic plasticity is typically very costly for an individual; learning requires time and energy, and on occasion involves dangerous mistakes. Therefore there is a second step: provided enough time, evolution may find an inexorable mechanism to replace the plastic mechanism. Thus a behavior that was once learned (the first step) may in time become instinctive (the second step). At first glance, this looks identical to Lamarckian evolution, but there is no direct alteration of the genotype, based on the experience of the phenotype.

The Scientific Definition of Instinct

The term "instincts" has had a long and varied use in psychology. In the 1870's, W. Wundt established the first psychology laboratory. At that time, psychology was primarily a branch of philosophy, but behavior became increasingly examined within the framework of the scientific method. This method has come to dominate all branches of science. While use of the scientific method led to increasingly rigorous definition of terms, by the close of the 19th century most repeated behavior was considered instinctual. In a survey of the literature at that time, one researcher chronicled 4000 human instincts, meaning someone applied the label to any behavior that was repetitive. As research became more rigorous and terms better defined, instinct as an explanation for human behavior became less common. In a conference in 1960, chaired by Frank Beach, a pioneer in comparative psychology and attended by luminaries in the field, the term was restricted in its application. During the 60's and 70's, textbooks still contained some discussion of instincts in reference to human behavior. By the year 2000, a survey of the 12 best selling textbooks in Introductory Psychology revealed only one reference to instincts, and that was in regard to Freud's referral to "id insticts."

Any repeated behavior can be called "instinctual." As can any behavior for which there is a strong innate component. However, to distinguish behavior beyond the control of the organism from behavior that has a repetitive component we can turn to the book "Instinct" (1961) stemming from the 1960 conference. A number of criteria were established which distinguishes instinctual from other kinds of behavior. To be considered instinctual a behavior must be a) automatic, b) irresistible, c) occur at some point in development, d) triggered by some event in the environment, e) occur in every member of the species, f) unmodifiable, and g) govern behavior for which the organism needs no training (altho the organism may profit from experience and to that degree the behavior is modifiable). The absence of one or more of these criteria indicates that the behavior is not fully instinctual.

If these criteria are used in a rigorous scientific manner, application of the term "instinct" cannot be used in reference fo human behavior. When terms, such as mothering, territoriality, eating, mating, and so on, are used to denote human behavior they are seen to not meet the criteria listed above. In comparison to animal behavior such as hibernation, migration, nest building, mating and so on that are clearly instinctual, no human behavior meets the necessary criteria. In other words there are no human instincts.