From: {$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk   
      
   On 26/08/2025 09:36, Martin Harran wrote:   
   > All animals seem to be born with some level of innate knowledge;  a   
   > newborn mammalian child knows how to suckle its mother's teat; a   
   > newborn pup knows to yelp to attract its mother's attention; a   
   > squirrel knows to store nuts for the winter.   
   >   
   > It seems obvious that such knowledge is stored within our DNA but has   
   > research into the human genome come up with anything at all to   
   > indicate where or how it is actually stored?   
   >   
      
   To restate the well-known, a recipe is a better analogy for a genome   
   than a blueprint. Looking for a specific location ("where") in the   
   genome for the encoding of behaviour is a mistake.   
      
   The general answer is that organisation of the nervous is controlled by   
   the interaction of various parts of the genome (and to various degrees   
   the environment), and in some cases behaviours are inherent in that   
   organisation.   
      
   For humans this is nigh on impossible to answer because of the   
   complexity of the system. You can ask simpler questions, such as   
   behaviour in Caenorhabditis elegans, which has a small number of neurons   
   with deterministic development, or how the processing of sensory data is   
   controlled by the genome. At the extreme you could look at chemotaxis in   
   bacteria, where one can look at how the interaction of a G protein   
   coupled receptor with a small molecule sets of a chain of protein   
   interactions that result in physical movement of the bacterium.   
      
   I don't seen any obvious reason why things would be different in   
   single-celled eukaryotes, though one might reasonably expect larger   
   repertoires and greater sophistication of behaviour. Moving to   
   multicellular organisms intercellular signalling adds another layer of   
   complexity, and in animals there's an additional layer of neuronal   
   signalling.   
      
   But perhaps I overstate the difficulty in asking questions about humans.   
   The patellar reflex is found in a number of mammals including humans. A   
   relative short chain of neurons connects the sensory input to the reflex   
   motor movement, reducing the question to how is that arrangement of   
   neurons represented in the genome. A somewhat more complicated system is   
   represented by the diving reflex.   
      
   --   
   alias Ernest Major   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)