Recent content by Rebecca Moise

If this fascinating behavior of eels and salmon does not result from evolution and instinct, where does it come from? Perhaps I should know better than to ask that question. God put it there? Creationism? Is that the alternative theory? If not, then what? As someone said in an earlier post, this...

Interesting discussion of the "Sauce Bearnaise phenomenon" in Melvin Konner's 1982 book The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. Konner explains the term was coined by experimental psychologist Martin Seligman who happened to eat filet mignon with his favorite Sauce...

Well, yes, the appetite stimulating properties of marijuana is known, the "munchies." I hadn't thought of it in this context, but makes sense. The idea of Lamarckian transmission emerges in works on human evolution, including places you might not expect this. Sigmund Freud believed in...

I did not know marijuana could help with this. This introduces a new dimension, the human ability to change or override an instinctual response by the use of drugs or chemicals.

As a psychotherapist I work every day to help people change response patterns that are partially instinctive. It would be sad to deny the possibility of change and choice. I have a problem defining instinct as a fixed and unalterable. The pattern itself may be fixed, but how this translates into...

"It smelling really bad to us" IS the instinct. At least if we define instinct as something like "genetic behavior mechanism." Taste, smell, things striking us as good or repulsive, are the means by which instincts manifest themselves. Instincts consist of emotions, feelings, sensations...

It can be difficult, even confusing, to think about instincts in the abstract. If I could venture, again, into this seemingly forbidden territory: if we say a cat's burying and cleaning behaviors are "instincts" what are we saying? What do we know about instincts generally? Instincts help...

The first nations people were wise to hold the beaver in high esteem. They are both intelligent and extremely social. Both parents help raise the kits. When offspring become sexually mature, they leave their mother and original home to go off on their own. Mrs. Richards observed, however, that...

There is probably a lot to be learned from the behavior of beavers, including the interplay between instinct and learning. If you like beavers you might be interested that a woman named Dorothy Richards observed and wrote about beavers living on her property in upstate NY. Also she raised some...

Probably sunlight also had something to do with the purification of the water, ridding it of disease producing organisms. There was a purification process, if natural rather than artificial. Without some kind of purification, the death rate in cities was high, so much so that without constant...

I don't think humans do fare very well when they mix feces with drinking water. In the animal world there are many ways of avoiding excessive contact with feces. Mole rats build specialized "latrine chambers" in their underground habitats. A new paper in Animal Behavior examines alternative...

One might directly observe reactions to bodily waste. Whether and to what extent any of these might be an "evolutionary response" involve thinking about the observation, including thinking about how instincts operate generally. In response to Stochastic's Feb. 9th raising this issue, are...

Without your comment, Stochastic, I was thinking this discussion is producing little more than irritation. I'm too interested in the topic to be argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. I'm reminded of the flood of protest that greeted E.O. Wilson's "sociobiology," including some...

There are times when one set of instincts might be altered, or suppressed altogether, by a different set of instincts. This might not involve "psychological choice" or the ambiguity between two sets of conflicting instincts might make room for some degree of psychological choice.

A cat that lives 10 years might produce more kittens than one that lives 6 years.