You’re sitting on the deck

  

…and a fly lands on your leg.  You brush it off with your hand, but it comes back.  You swat at it to no avail.  It won’t leave you alone.  You pick up a dayglo plastic flyswatter and take a whack at it.  A swing and a miss.  You whack right next to the fly, but he escapes and never comes back.  Nothing else would do the trick but that just did.  The fly just learned. 

 

Another time, another annoying fly.  You pick up a dayglo plastic flyswatter and suddenly the fly is nowhere to be seen.  I suspect that fly has developed an innate sense to avoid dayglo plastic flyswatters.  Instinctive behavior.

 

I wonder about learned behavior and instinctive behavior.  Where does instinctive behavior come from; survival of the fittest; genetically encoded behavior that provides such a survival advantage that the flies that have that behavior outcompete/out-survive all the other flies and they all end up having that trait?

 

And learned behavior only applies to that one fly?  He’s not genetically encoded to be afraid of dayglo plastic things, but he is coded to fly away and not come back if something scary almost kills him?

 

So what exactly is the connection between learned and instinctive behavior; why one and not the other?  Does instinctive behavior always start out as learned behavior?  Given enough time would all learned behavior eventually become instinctive behavior?  Why not?  If you have to learn the same thing every generation endlessly, wouldn’t it be a lot handier if it just became instinctive?

 

You can’t create a hornless breed of cattle by chopping off the horns of every cow and bull before you breed them.  Experiences don’t get encoded in genetics.  Unless they do.  Are some people afraid of snakes, even if they have not had experience with them?  Is that an instinctive reflex?  How did it come about?  Was being naturally repelled by snakes a genetic mutation that provided such a competitive advantage that it replicated more in the people that had it than the people that didn’t?  Or is there a more direct way for experience to make its way into the genetic code?  Is there a path for fears and phobias that is not explained by survival of the fittest?