Re: [Fwd: New info for nature/nurture fans]

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Comrades,
    First off a beautiful quote on brain rewiring from Carrol Cox.  However
there is more to this if one considers this a little bit.  If the ferret
learns to see with the ear regions of the brain, what does that say about
animal "instincts"?  I would hazard a guess here that this puts into
question the idea of instinct itself.

    There are two ways this seems so, first that the genome seems too small
to control such detail which have suggested what instincts would do, but
more importantly this indicates that some form which the genome might order
such as the eye structure might be understood in a new way after this.  That
is if some structure is shaped by the genome, but that doesn't determine a
definite structure to behavior then what is instinct?  The answer is of
course that instinct is not what we think it is.  Where we think animals are
instinctive then, there is a hidden meaning to things that has been exposed
by showing how plastic the brain is in non-primate animals.  The hidden
meaning being that animals are plastic like us, but that a stable system
emerges in them which we interpret as "instinct".  That stability does not
come from the rules of inheritance as instinct suggests.

    I won't speculate beyond the above, but I would suggest that this has
extraordinary implications for our view of the environment.
cheers,
Doyle Saylor