How do Parent Behavior Memories transfer to Offspring? Via DNA?

Conversation
1

Brainstorming QUESTION:

1-What does science know about HOW instinctual memories, behavior traits, and skills needed for survival, present in (primarily here) the parents of mammals and birds, get transferred to their offspring? Via DNA?

For context, The simple alternative method that offspring utilize to acquire needed skills is to learn them from watching others of their species DO something, after being born. Either from their parents, or from others of the species group. Certainly primates have a very long period of nurturing during growth to adulthood.

But many creatures, reptiles and some birds, pop out of eggs, and get busy living right away! And they already know what to do to survive. When separated from the group, they often are still able to survive. It’s amazing to me…

Or, the third possibility, that offspring are relearning skills independently, on their own, after each birth.

ONE Simple example that may NOT require a specific instinct imprint: A chimp or bear, may not be born innately KNOWING the following SKILL: They can push a stick into a bee hive, or hollow log, let the insects cover it, and then pull the stick out and lick the insects off the stick. This skill may be RELEARNED independently by each creature, via their basic visualization and problem solving instincts, and little else.

A FEW MORE EXAMPLES of survival skills, mostly just listed without further details: Nature or Nurture? Innate Instinct or Acquired after birth? How do they pass survival behavior to offspring? >> >> >>

1-BIRDS, the core skill of building a nest. Can most nest building birds construct a nest if they have never seen another bird do it?

CALLING a great ornithologist: @John_Harshman

2—OTTERS, the skill of using a rock to break open shells to consume the contents. Did they see the ROCK AS TOOL trick once, BINGO, it was learned? Or do they all do it from instinct?

3—VOCAL LANGUAGE in humans, vs the different, more modern skill set needed to read and write

The puzzle centers around how vastly different cognition functions in a living brain, which requires constant heat, and nutrients supplied by circulating blood - compared to how DNA functions, during reproduction. (Am trying to avoid the loaded word “information” here.)

All thoughts inside a brain require living tissue to utilize and save them, or the contents are LOST at death. So how can this be “saved”, and then send thru genetics to the offspring? (I’m repeating myself alas…)

One last pertinent BRAINSTORM nugget:

THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY EFFECT, no longer well supported by experimentation, but intriguing. Linked here, primarily as food for hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect

1 Like
2

Many bird behaviors are instinctive, and nest-building is clearly one. Few birds have seen a nest being constructed before doing it, though I suppose they might get a little information from having been hatched in one. One must assume that this behavior, which in many species is very elaborate, must ultimately trace back to some bits of DNA. Then again, other elaborate behaviors are learned. In songbirds, song is learned by listening to adults (not necessarily just the parents), but it’s been shown that birds are strongly biased toward learning the songs of their species, so they aren’t complete tabulae rasae. But working out the details at the genetic level would be very difficult. Anyway, some behaviors are instinctive, some are learned, and others are a combination of the two.

4 Likes
3

One thing I find interesting in my birdwatching excursions is how the song of the ubiquitous Song Sparrow varies depending on locale, even though it is always unmistakable which species it is coming from.

1 Like
4

The brain itself is not in the DNA, but the “instructions” for it’s development and basic structures are.

Since the basic structures of the brain develop embryologically, and the behavior of the organism is a product of the brain (and presumably central nervous system too), and since the brains’ development is encoded in DNA, it follows that instinctive(not to be confused with learned) behavior is encoded in DNA too.

Learned behavior isn’t passed on and doesn’t develop embryologically. A lot of the brains wiring responsible for learned behavior develops later in life, but isn’t directly encoded in DNA. The capacity for learning is encoded, but not what you learn specifically.

Instinctive behavior, in so far as it is instinctive and not learned, must develop evolutionarily first.

If it is learned it can’t be passed on. Learned behavior also isn’t somehow written back into DNA simply because it is learned. While you could imagine selective pressures favoring any mutations that contribute to programming in behavior similar to the learned one, the mere fact it is learned isn’t going to write it into the DNA.
The environment has to favor any spontaneously arising mutations that contribute to and produce that behavior, and if it does favor those mutations and if those mutations do arise, it’s irrelevant whether the organism has also learned that behavior first or not.

1 Like
5

There is a whole field of Evolutionary Game Theory that deals with completing behaviors, and the behaviors may be instinctive, learned, or a combination of both. This is a mathematical way to study how behaviors interact, and has nothing to do with biology, but it could effect fitness.

The Hawk/Dove game (also “Chicken”) is an example where more/less aggressive strategies compete. Level of aggression is tied to hormone expression, and that is something that can be passed on to descendants. Learned behavior also modifies aggression.

Nest building is more complicated, and young birds are not always good at it, so there is more learning going on there too. It is an active field of study.

1 Like
6

Not around here it isn’t. Bewick’s wrens often produce a very similar song. You have to listen closely to tell the difference.

7

ALL these first responses to my query, have given me lots of great threads to follow up on. Thanks Y’all ! :+1: But the above quote from Rumraket gets to the heart of my conjecture in physical terms, with the word “Directly” doing a lot of heavy lifting. That so far as science has discovered about the CHEMISTRY, knowledge in the form of learned skills, stored in a living brain is not translated specifically into unique DNA and then passed to offspring.

But hormone levels, I just learned, that are produced by physical glands, can be passed forward to offspring in some manner, it seems to follow. And there is so much more for me to learn. And I can easily visualize that it might just take a very, very long time for significant changes in the instincts of a creature to be reflected in the offspring. We have 3.7 billion years to work with here, no stop watch needed.

THE EXAMPLE THAT CREATED MY QUESTION: I forgot to mention this one creature’s puzzling pattern, I live around a lot of suburban rabbits and hares and come across them all the time on walks in the woods. And it confounds me to no end: They do NOT fear predators! WHY ! “Wake up you fools! GET SCARED!” So they become the common snacks of raccoons, coyotes, hawks, etc. The wild hares here with more ancient heredity will hop out of the way, but still do so, with very little urgency. But the rabbits, which may have originally arrived from pet store stocks around here, their primary response is to FREEZE. I could grab them off the grocery shelf, but don’t want to be cruel. the freeze choice is like the extremely well camouflaged ruffed grouse chooses to deploy. Except the ruffed grouse are so well disguised, that this behavior is obviously well chosen. I once sat down to have a sandwich, and did not see a grouse, with mottled brown and grey feathers, smack dab in front of me!- on a wooded, overgrown railroad grade for about 10 minutes. Scared me spleen-less, when they suddenly bolted, and flew away. But my local rabbits all have dirty white fur coats, and strongly stick out against ALL backgrounds. Sitting ducks, as the ducks say.

So I’m thinking, “Rabbit! Why can’t you get the message, over time, in your DNA, …and BE AFRAID, and fear all these predators?”

And this RABBIT puzzle has led to ONE HYPOTHESIS, as how one type of memory might be IMPRINTED, and then maybe is passed on to offspring. Imagine a creature, that when young, it watches their own parents be consumed by a predator. ACK! A big trauma. One assumes some degree of PTSD would occur in that young creature. Several of my own earliest memories as a human stem from disasters occurring at age 5-6 years old that have never left me…yet the rest of childhood is a blur. TRAUMA prints to the brain strongly. Therefore, this individual would lead a life with much more fear of predators than many of the others in the group. That may alter the hormone mechanism, or it’s adjustments to stimuli, in the next generation.(maybe ??) Perhaps most rabbits tend to get eaten well BEFORE they get a chance to reproduce, so the gene pool is not affected by the fool rabbits with no fear. But that only describes the basic “differential reproduction” engine, not the rest of the genetics driving biological evolution.

It seems to me, that there is still quite a bit of mystery as to HOW such patterns end up being inherited by the next generation. And yet…I seem to be missing how much LEARNING seems to occur within the lifespan of many creatures. MMMnnnn…

RABBIT FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Here is one mind bending hypothesis, that takes a HUGE leap into trying to describe the situation of how nature preserves its PATTERNS of behavior. The proposal of Rubert Sheldrake. His idea of MORPHIC RESONANCE. Don’t laugh too quickly, because 1-Sheldrake has spent vast amounts of time brainstorming with a good buddy in polymath Freeman Dyson. Dyson, for me, is absolutely (!) one of the greatest cross discipline scientific thinkers of all time. 2-This idea sprung forth trying to discover how homing pigeons always find their way back home, with no testable sense input known. And he has spent DECADES doing unquestionably hard science trying to sort that one out. Respect. 3-Never once has Sheldrake called his principle of Morphic Resonance a Theory, instead, he is quick to clarify that it is only a hypothesis. So for me at least, Sheldrake does not qualify as a “loon”. (LOL)

QUOTE from the Wikipedia page: "Sheldrake’s morphic resonance posits that “memory is inherent in nature”[2][15] and that “natural systems … inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind.”[15

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake>

Sheldrake, Rupert (2011). Icon books: The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature

Google Books link < The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature - Rupert Sheldrake - Google Books >