Question

What do the experiments reported by Lerhman suggest about the "innateness" of behaviors such as nest building in rats or pecking in chicks? What is the alternative way of understanding the emergence of behaviors in the course of development? Discuss how the concept of instinct reproduces a preformationist bias

Answer 1

  Innateness refers to traits that are inbone rather than acquired or learnt. Innate behaviour occurs naturally and automatically. These are traits such as smiling and laughing that appear as part of the milestones of development in infants rather than being learned by example

Some examples of innate behaviour are web making in spiders, best building in birds, fighting among male stickleback fish, cocoon spinning in insects such as moths and swimming in dolphins and other aquatic species.

The belief that a trait is innate is commonly expressed by saying it is in the genes. but genes play an essential role in the production of every trait. Consequently it will not do to stay simply that innate traits are caused by genes whilst acquired traits are caused by the environment

Innate behaviour does not have to be learnt or practiced there also called instinctive behaviour. an Instinct is the ability of an animal to perform a behaviour the first time it is exposed to the proper stimulus for example a dog will drool the first time_and every time_ it is exposed to food.

Innate words always say something about origin. Its cause is located inside the organism. what is not innate originates in the external world. when behaviour or capacities to behave our innate the word Instinct is applied. if a behaviour or capacity is not instinctive then its origin must be outside the organism. For example a criminal Instinct labels his criminality as having an internal Genesis, but does not explain how it developed, because everyone agrees that instincts can be overcome.

We see the concept of innate used with at least some explanatory force when Darwin wrote The Descent of Man,that instincts are” are gained step by step through the variability of the mental organs and natural selection, without any conscious intelligence on the part of the animal during each successive generation” He was saying that as long as there is variation of heritable propensities for behaviour within a population, the distal causes of instincts are environmental. more than label the source of instant. it provides an explanation of how innate behaviour capacities arises they are the result of selective pressures on population

By the late 19th century Instinct was being used by psychologists to label a waste collection of behaviour and capacities .As far as the internal origins of instance are genetic, this fact alone can explain how individual organisms come to develop stable developmentally fixed behaviour. they would therefore be manifest in isolation experiments which were supposed to show what an organism that when deprived of any opportunity to learn a behaviour through interaction with an external environment.