[cantrevealname]

This brings up the question about whether there are hereditary information transmission methods other than DNA. There are so many things we ascribe to “instinct” that might be information transmitted from parent to offspring in some encoded format.

Like songs that newborn songbirds know, migration routes that animals know without being shown, that a mother dog should break the amniotic sac to release the puppies inside, what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.

It seems it implausible to me that all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling; it seems to require much more complex encoding of information, pattern matching, templates, and/or memory.

[ben_w]

> what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.

However this specifically works in humans — and considering the diversity of actual human preferences includes, amongst many other things, non-existant dragons* — the first I heard of the term "superstimulus" was with the example of certain beetles that kept trying to copulate with beer bottles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

* Humans must have something guiding us, or we'd all be (a) bisexual and (b) equally often aroused by dragons as by those we could actually have a child with; the fact that dragons happen at all is simply an indication that our brains are likely using a very simple set of heuristics to get there, and simple heuristics is totally a thing that DNA could encode

[thrw42A8N]

Often human sexuality is rooted in power dynamics and these things are associations. I certainly am attracted to powerful women wearing whatever style of clothing my primary school teacher had...

[ben_w]

Power is one of many aspects of human sexuality, but it's also part of much broader human social dynamics, and I have not seen evidence that power dynamics are unusually predominant in sexual vs non-sexual relationships.

[thrw42A8N]

I wouldn't say it's predominant. It just influences it, and for some people it's all about that and much less about anything like appearance or the sex itself.

[Nasrudith]

I recall hearing about newborn birdsongs being learned "in utero" (not sure if quite the right term but lets go with that). In that case the channel for transmission was sound. It was apparently used as a shibboleth against brood parasite egg replacement. If the baby didn't sing the song that was being sung to it then the baby got abandoned by presumably disappointed parents. I suppose it could also be a 'health test' of sorts since sufficiently deformed or disabled offspring would also fail.

Parental teaching and learning is a spectrum and not a binary. We've found with relocating deer (to similar but not identical environments) doing worse until learning occurs over a few generations and they catch up. Animals may not be as intelligent as us but their ability to learn and adapt should not be underestimated.

[devmor]

“In ovo” would be the egg-laying animal equivalent to “In utero”

[aydyn]

You might be interested in epigenetic inheritence. We do know that some epigenetic marks are passed down but its still very much unknown how much heritable information is encoded in epigenetics.

[PittleyDunkin]

While histones and methylation aren't DNA themselves, they're certainly incapable of functioning without DNA. I'd assume the parent poster was referring to further still mechanics.

[westurner]

Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...

Methods of intergenerational transfer: DNA, RNA, bacteria, fungi, verbal latencies, explicit training

From https://x.com/westurner/status/1213675095513878528 :

> Does the fundamental limit of the amount of classical information encodable in the human genome (even with epigenetics & simultaneous encoding) imply a vast capacity for learning survival-beneficial patterns in very little time, with very few biasing priors?

> [Fundamental 'gbit' requirement 1: “No Simultaneous Encoding”:] if a gbit is used to perfectly encode one classical bit, it cannot simultaneously encode any further information. Two close variants of this are Zeilinger’s Principle (10) and Information Causality (11).

> Is there a proved presumption that genes only code in sequential combinations? Still overestimating the size of the powerset of all [totally-ordered] nonlocal combinations? Still trying to understand counterfactuals in re: constructor theory

Constructor theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory

(quantum) Counterfactuals reasoning: https://www.google.com/search?q=(quantum)+*Counterfactual*+r... :

> Counterfactual reasoning is the process of considering events that could have happened but didn't.

Counterfactual definiteness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_definiteness

Quantum discord; there are multiple types of quantum entropy; entanglement and non-entanglement entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_discord

N-ary entanglement,

Collective unconscious > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

FWIU memories are stored in the cortex and also in the hippocampus; "Brain found to store three copies of every memory" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41352124

[westurner]

... How do dogs know what not to eat in the wild?

[andsoitis]

> ... How do dogs know what not to eat in the wild?

They don’t.

[westurner]

Then how have any survived?

Observe the human response to dandelions; are they weeds or are they edible?

Do they have lobed leaves? What [neurons,] do mammals have to heuristically generalize according to visual and gustatory-olfactory features, and counterfactually which don't they have?

Or it's entirely learned, and then the coding for the substrate is still relevant

[bilsbie]

And can those stored behaviors affect the phenotype of the offspring too? (LaMark has entered the building)

[crazydoggers]

Any sexual hereditary information needs to be passed via germ line cells. So if it’s not encoded within a single sperm or egg cell, then it can’t be passed down via sexual heredity.

Information that might be passed from parent to offspring after conception is not hereditary by definition, and would be a type of learning, (ie birds singing to babies in eggs, antibody transferring from mother to baby)

Everything else you mention is very easily passed down via genetics which is not chemical signaling, but actual information encoding. And simple rules can lead to complex behavior.

Edit: Here’s an example to better illustrate the genes power of information encoding. Camouflage, which is a genetically heritable trait, can be incredibly complex. We can think of the information encoded in the genes for camouflage as a visual description of the environment that the animal evolved in. So the gene’s have actually encoded what the dessert environment looks like, or the sea floor, or the vegetation. That’s a single example, but every animal carries such complex information (how to navigate certain landscapes, how to survive current living pathogens in the environment, etc) within their genes.

[pessimizer]

Human babies pick up prosody in the womb from their mothers. Here's a random, seemingly comprehensive article about that that I haven't read yet (I know about this from other sources.)

https://aeon.co/essays/how-fetuses-learn-to-talk-while-theyr...

[dewarrn1]

Or even non-hereditary information transmission methods...

McConnell, J. (1962). Memory transfer via cannibalism in planaria. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 3, 1-42.

[neom]

You might enjoy the research of Dr. Ian Stevenson. It's his research that got me deep down the rabbit hole on this subject many years ago. (I have 1 vivid memory that I would call a "past life memory") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson

[gliptic]

This is paranormal reincarnation mumbo-jumbo, not inheritance.

[pigeons]

How to tell the difference from imagination?

[neom]

When I imagine, the "videos" are devoid of emotion or feeling, unlike my memories. This specific "thing" has a strong feeling and emotion connected to it, unlike the other thinking that is very sterile, it's the only thing I carry that I know I've not experienced but it has the association of memory qualia.

[Mistletoe]

What’s the memory?

[akira2501]

> migration routes that animals know

How do you know they "know" them?

> all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling

Why do you presume they are chemical signals?

> pattern matching

Psychedelics show the absurd power of layered pattern matching in our brains and what happens when you disrupt those mechanisms. I would not discount it so readily.

[Supermancho]

> How do you know they "know" them?

It's a statistical guess, as with most phenomena. When individuals, alone, consistently travel toward direction without observable prompting, it's expected there is another stimuli. This may be an unseen force (birds following magnetic fields). However, it appears there is a genetic component.

https://archive.is/vt6rU#selection-797.2-797.236

Notably: "They also inherit from their parents the directions in which they need to fly in the autumn and spring, and if the parents each have different genetically encoded directions, their offspring will end up with an intermediate direction."

[akira2501]

> It's expected there is another stimuli

Yes, and your link then identifies it:

> They have at least three different compasses at their disposal: one allows them to extract information from the position of the sun in the sky, another uses the patterns of the stars at night, and the third is based on Earth’s ever present magnetic field.

They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.

[Supermancho]

> They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.

The link identifies it as genetic. If there were no genetic component, there would be consistency, regardless of genetic lineage.

> They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.

Knowing is a soft term, for which I provided a definition to answer a second order question. Diving into any further classification of "knowing", is a separate issue. The topic under discussion is not definitional knowing for other organisms. The topic is the genetic transfer of information, as per this article. Hence, graciously, it can be assumed that "knowing" is shorthand for this concept.

[int_19h]

Having a compass is one thing, but that only gives you the overall direction, not the specific path to follow.

[madaxe_again]

Yeah, there’s fundamental stuff that animals just don't know. Like cats have the instinct to hunt, and are good at that - but unless they’ve seen another cat eating prey, they don’t realise that that’s a thing that they can do, and you’d think that would be a pretty core learning to pass on.

[hinkley]

Frank Herbert would be so pleased.

[spockz]

Isn’t this the whole plot behind Assassin’s Creed’s Animus where they are able to look into (and “interact “) with the past based on information in the cells/DNA.