Innate Behavior

9 Key excerpts on "Innate Behavior"

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  Much Like Us

  What Science Reveals about the Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviour of Animals

  • Norbert Sachser, Ruby Bilger(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Simply put, if an animal perfectly executes a behaviour that it had no prior opportunity to learn, and if that same behaviour occurs in the same way among all members of its species, then it is most likely innate: take, for example, the elaborate webs that many spiders are able to weave from the first try. While such indirect conclusions are key to understanding certain behaviours, behavioural geneticists take a different approach. As the title suggests, their field of research looks specifically at how an individual’s genes influence its behaviour. The findings and methods of this discip- line will be discussed in the following section. At the outset, it is important to clarify that no behaviour is either purely genetic or purely a product of environment. As previously CLASSICAL METHODS OF STUDYING INNATE BEHAVIOUR 63 mentioned, all behaviour is a result of the interplay between both forces. Nonetheless, genetics or environment alone can also cause differences in the behaviour of two individuals. If a zebra finch raised by its parents is given the choice between mating with another zebra finch or a Bengalese finch, it will choose its conspecific. But if it is raised by Bengalese finches and then given the same choice, it will prefer the Bengalese finch. Does the fact that a zebra finch chooses a mate have anything to do with its genes? Of course! The ability to choose requires a brain that could never have evolved without the right information encoded in its genome. Every behaviour, no matter how simple, ultimately arises from the activity of nerve and muscle cells which are, in turn, controlled by genes. But does the difference in the birds’ choice of mate have anything to do with genetics? Not at all – these different choices are a product of the parents that raised the birds, a purely environmental factor.

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  Psychobiology Behavior From a Biological Perspective

  • James McGaugh(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  It is logically indefensible to categorize any behavior as unlearned unless the characteristics of learned behavior have been thoroughly explored and are well known. * According to Sluckin (1965): Such young birds—domestic chicks, ducklings and goslings, to name a few—tend to follow their parents almost as soon as they are out of the egg. This initial tendency in the young to cling to, or to follow, parent-figures may be described as instinctive or innate, by which is meant that the young are not trained and do not have to learn to behave in this manner (p. 1) . . . An innately determined pattern of responses normally unites the neonate with its mother, or mother substitute (p. 16) . . . Nevertheless the approach and following tendency, or drive is innate and primary (p. 23) . . . Since this was so in the case of chicks that had been in the dark prior to the test, there is little doubt that these preferences are innate (p. 33) . . . Such instinctive recog-nition might occur in some species but not in others (p. 49). THE CONCEPT OF INSTINCT 55 The second kernel hypothesis was analyzed by Lehrman (1953): The use of explanatory categories such as innate and genetically fixed obscures the necessity of investigating developmental process in order to gain insight into the actual mechanisms of behavior and their interrelations. (Further) It is clear, however, that to say a behavior pattern is inherited throws no light on its development except for the purely negative implication that certain types of learning are not involved. In spite of these cogent analyses of instinct by Beach and by Lehrman, the instinct concept remains unmodified in contemporary thought about the nature of behaviors which are not obviously learned as such. There is no simple explanation for this fact. Data arguments in disproof of instinct theory have been advanced (Lehrman, 1953), but these argu-ments have certainly had little effect upon contemporary thought about instincts.

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  The Behavior of Animals

  Mechanisms, Function, and Evolution

  • Johan J. Bolhuis, Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Jerry A. Hogan, Johan J. Bolhuis, Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Jerry A. Hogan(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In popular discussions, “innate” usually implies that a behavior is some-how “genetically determined” or “in our genes.” One should keep in mind that there is no direct, one-to-one effect of genes on behavior. Genes are sections of DNA that code for proteins, not for behavior patterns. This is not to say that behavior has nothing to do with the expression of genes, but the relationship between the two is far more com-plex than the naive idea that there are genes for certain behaviors, as one often reads in the popular press. For a start, it is likely that several genes are somehow involved in a certain behavior and that they interact with each other as well as with the animal’s internal and external environment. Also, as we have seen already in the previous sec-tion, during embryological development, gene expression is very much dependent on where in the embryo the cells are, and on the particular time during development. This is likely to be the case in behavioral development as well. What one can say is that differences in behavior may vary with genetic differences. For instance, it is possible to select animals artificially on certain behavioral traits, such as aggression. Lagerspetz (1964) selected mice on certain characteristics of aggressive behavior, in particular the time it took for an individual to attack another individual in a standard situation. Fast attackers were mated with each other, and so were slow attackers. After se-lecting in this way over a number of generations, two subpopulations developed, with one subpopulation showing a high aggression score and the other showing a much lower aggres-sion score. Clearly, the differences between the two behavioral extremes are related to ge-netic differences. However, we do not know much about the relationship between genes and behavior in this case, which is likely to be complex. For instance, it is not clear which aspect of aggressive behavior, or its underlying mechanisms, was actually selected for.

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  Dilthey's Dream

  Essays on Human Nature and Culture

  • Mr Derek Freeman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • ANU Press

    (Publisher)

  The existence of this behavioural plasticity does not, however, preclude the existence of genetic diversity in populations, or the existence of genetically programmed behaviour mechanisms in individual organisms. Viewed in evolutionary perspective, therefore, learning behaviour is a phylogenetic adaptation, a way of completing the differentiation of the central nervous and related systems ‘in greater detail and more adaptively than can be accomplished by gene encoding alone’, 85 and it is this evolutionary innovation which has made possible the adaptive radiation which we observe in the diverse cultures of man. A stage has now been reached, then, in the biological study of behaviour where any rigid and pervasive dichotomy between innate and acquired responses has become otiose. Galambos, in his recent discussion of the brain correlates of learning, has written: ‘every sample of behaviour reveals an aspect of the past history of the organism that has been stored within the brain. These memories arise both via genes and through experience’; and he has suggested that ‘all of them come into existence, are stored, and receive their expression through fundamentally the same mechanisms’. 86 83 R.J. Dubos, So Human an Animal (New York, Scribner, 1968), p. 77. 84 W.R. Thompson, ‘Influence of prenatal maternal anxiety on emotionality in young rats’, Science (1957), 125:698–699; G. Gottlieb, ‘Prenatal behavior in birds’, Quarterly Review of Biology (1968), 43:148–174. 85 J.L. Fuller and W.R. Thompson, Behavior Genetics (New York, John Wiley, 1960), p. 4. 86 R. Galambos, ‘Brain correlates of learning’, in The Neurosciences , p. 641. DILTHEY'S DREAM 18 Thus, the discoveries of recent decades demand of the student of animal and human behaviour an interactionist paradigm which gives recognition to genetical and environmental feedback and interaction both in the ontogeny of individual organisms and in the phylogeny of breeding populations.

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  Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training, Adaptation and Learning

  • Steven R. Lindsay(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  happening to them. The leg-lifting movement does not appear to be an action that they voluntary choose to express, but rather one that comes over them under the right set of circumstances. As is characteristic of many fixed action sequences, it is very hard to train a dog to lift its leg on command, even though the dog may perform the action many times a day. The resistance of leg lifting to voluntary control supports the view that it is an instinctive response controlled at a primitive level of neural organization. This points to an important criterion of the FAP: that its occurrence is spontaneous and not subject to learning (or much learning) for its display. Although the FAP is not dependent on learning for its appearance, it is not entirely independent of the actualizing influence of experience either. Without an experiential context or field of action the FAP will remain in a dormant and potential state.

  INSTINCTUAL LEARNING

  The historical antagonism between ethology and behaviorism was based to a large extent on the relative importance each discipline placed on the role of learning in the development of behavior. This opposition was embodied in the careers and theoretical orientations of B. F. Skinner (1974) and Konrad Lorenz (1982). Skinner emphasized the importance of experimental analysis and learning as they occur under controlled laboratory conditions. Lorenz, on the other hand, downplayed the importance of experimentation and stressed instead direct observation of animal behavior occurring within its natural setting. Whereas behaviorists believed that behavior could be best explained in terms of learning, ethologists objected to this narrow focus and emphasized the significance of phylogenetic or biological contributions governing behavior. Both of these positions have turned out to be excessively exclusionary and doctrinaire. Certainly, the behavior of many animals is guided by instinctual mechanisms and various programmed motor patterns, but these innate contributions are not necessarily rigid nor entirely outside of the influence of learning. Further, in conjunction with an animal’s biological endowment, learning itself is an evolutionary adaptation that determines (in terms of general potential) what animals will learn and how they will learn it. Some adaptations are learned readily, some slowly, and some not at all.

  William James defined instinct “as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance” (1890/1950:383). According to James, instinctive behavior consists of reflexes and impulses linked together to form complicated behavior patterns and tendencies. Although many behavioral adjustments to the environment are biologically encoded as predispositions or even imperatives to action, such instinctive impulses are not entirely immune to the influence of experience. For example, in the case of animals possessing a well-developed memory, the first expression of an instinctive behavior may be a spontaneous response occurring without much purpose, but subsequent displays will be progressively influenced by experience and the effect of learning. The behavior is still instinctive but is now expressed under the additional influence of some expectation of producing a result (Thorpe, 1956/1966).

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  Handbook of Psychobiology

  • Michael S. Gazzaniga(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  In the physiological literature of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, all behavior was expressed in terms of reflex actions, simple, on the basis of inherited and directly developed neuronal circuitry, or conditioned, that is, “learned” associa-tions made indirectly between sense organs and motor channels. This view was challenged, first by ethologists, who found behavior to be inherited in the form of useful, that is, species-survivally-meaning- ful “packages” or fixed action patterns. Each package involves a complex sequence of stereotyped movements that follow each other in a fixed order. The package only appears at an appropriate stage of development, for example, sexual maturation, and it may appear spontaneously, in the absence of a specific stimulus, as an urge or “drive,” or it may appear as a displacement activity when a state of conflict exists between opposed drives such as attack and flight. Later, invertebrate neurophysi-ologists found examples of behavior in which there is no requirement for immediate sensory input for patterned output to occur. In the mollusc Tritonia, in 1969, the isolated brain was shown to be able to produce the neural program of a characteristic fixed action pattern, associated in the intact animal with swimming escape behavior, after a single elec-tric shock to a nerve. Conditioned reflexes have been demonstrated in a very few invertebrates. Only a few insects, notably bees and wasps, can learn to associate colors or objects with their home or food sources. Avoidance conditioning is, by contrast, easy to obtain. Lability of Reflexes Reflexes are easy to demonstrate in invertebrates, but they range from a classroom level of reliability to the embarrassingly fickle. I have seen a locust fry to death on a heated plate because for some reason its jump escape mechanism, which was being tested and had previously been found to be normal, was inhibited.

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  Human Ethology

  • Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These obviously innate propensities have long been known to behavioral scientists. H. S. Reimarus (1762), Charles Darwin (1872), W. James (1890), and D. A. Spalding (1873) discussed them and distinguished among them and those behavior patterns that an animal acquires during the course of its lifetime through learning processes. They also pointed out that such behavioral patterns do not have to be fully developed at birth. Some behavior patterns mature during the course of ontogeny. Thus, freshly hatched male ducks show no trace of their species-specific courtship patterns. Even if they are raised, however, in complete social isolation, they will nonetheless develop these species-typical courtship behaviors. This simple distinction between innate and learned behavior has proved itself of value in taxonomy. O. Heinroth (1910) employed courtship patterns as distinguishing characteristics in his detailed classification of ducks. He used these patterns in just the same way as morphological characteristics to correctly identify specific systematic categories. He found that homologous movements were modified to a greater or lesser extent according to degree of relatedness in different species and reconstructed the phylogeny of these movements, which he called “arteigene Triebhandlungen,” species-specific instinctive behavior patterns. In addition to the species specificity of the movements, the term “Trieb” refers to spontaneity as a characteristic, a quality which we will discuss later. K. Lorenz and N. Tinbergen (1939) spoke of “Erbkoordinationen” (fixed-action patterns) and emphasized that these patterns are passed on through the process of inheritance. More specifically, we may say that fixed-action patterns mature implying that the neuronal networks underlying these behavior patterns grow to functional maturity in a process of self-differentiation, according to the blueprint encoded in the genome of the individual. The processes by means of which a nervous system gets “wired” for its function are basically understood, due to the pioneering work of R. Sperry. Fixed-action patterns are frequently associated with orientation movements (taxes) the combination of which form the more complex “instinctive behavior patterns.”

  Deprivation experiments have long been used to demonstrate the presence of Innate Behavioral traits. This methodology has aroused a great deal of criticism. D. S. Lehrman (1953) clearly formulated the argument in a critique directed against Lorenz. Lehrman claimed that the deprivation experiment is meaningless because it is impossible to deprive an animal of all environmental influences. In extreme isolation, an animal is in an environment that influences it, even within the egg or uterus. As a result, it can gain experience and develop the preliminary stages of the behavior pattern in question. He cites the observations of Z. Y. Kuo on the development of precursors to pecking in the chick embryo. I have dealt at length with this and other experiments in Ethology: The Biology of Behavior

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  Essential Animal Behavior

  • Graham Scott(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  This may be because they never meet their parents, or any members of the parental generation, to learn from, or because their survival depends upon them being able to perform the behavior very soon after they hatch or are born, allowing no time for learning. Such behaviors are termed innate . The begging behavior of herring gull chicks that we discussed in Chapter 2 is an example of an Innate Behavior. You will no doubt remember that these chicks beg by pecking at the beaks of their parents in an attempt to stimulate them to regurgitate a meal. We also saw that a model bearing what would seem to be the most superficial resemblance to the beak of the parent bird would stimulate begging on the part of the chick. I am returning to this example because I want to make an important point about Innate Behaviors. Even though they can by their definition be performed with no practice, it would be wholly wrong to assume that they are inflexible in character, as Jack Hailman has demon-strated. Hailman presented herring gull chicks with models of the heads and beaks of either adult herring gulls or adult laughing gulls. The laughing gull ( Larus atricilla ) is a close relative of the herring gull and so the two models were very similar in shape. However, whereas the herring gull has a white head with a beak that is yellow with a red spot at its tip, the beak of a laughing gull is red all over and its head is black. Initially the young birds showed no preference for either model, pecking at both whenever they were presented (Fig. 4.4). This is not a surprising finding given what we already know about the responses of young herring gulls to beak-like stimuli. But as the days passed a different pattern was revealed. With time the Concept Nature versus nurture At an early juncture in the study of animal behavior two schools of thinking took up opposing positions on what came to be known as the nature–nurture debate.

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  Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science

  • Hayes, Steven C., Wilson, David Sloan(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Context Press

    (Publisher)

  It is also increasingly recognized that organisms are systems for turning environment and behavior into biology. Thus, a two-headed arrow is now in place between fields that study evolutionary mechanisms and those that study behavior with a functional and contextual approach. The vertebrate immune system provides an especially helpful analogy for thinking about our evolved system for behavioral change (Wilson et al., 2014). The immune system includes a so-called innate component, which consists of highly automated defenses that don’t change during the lifetime of the organism, and a so-called adaptive component, which includes the formation of approxi- mately 100 million different antibodies and selection of those that successfully bind to antigens. The terms are a bit confusing, because the innate component is highly adaptive and the adaptive component includes mechanisms that are highly innate. In any case, if we think of our evolved mechanisms for behavioral change as including both an innate and an adaptive component, then the modular view of evolutionary psychologists and the open-ended view of the so-called Standard Social Science Model can be seen to be compatible rather than being argued against each other (Wilson, 2017). Evolution & Contextual Behavioral Science 10 An example can be found in taste aversion. When it was originally encoun- tered, it was viewed as an entirely new form of learning (e.g., Garcia, Lasiter, Bermudez-Rattoni, & Deems, 1985) that directly challenged or even falsified the strategy of learning theory (e.g., Seligman, 1970) because it so dramatically vio- lated existing parameters of behavioral principles. As features of classical condi- tioning were examined and proved to apply to this case, it became more common to think of it as an evolutionarily established modification of the temporal and stimulus parameters impacting classical conditioning (e.g., Revusky, 1971).

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