The “Nature versus Nurture” debate just got
more complicated. (Well, even more complicated than the original “If
you really think you can reduce all of biology to such a simplistic
division you’re missing pretty much every point involved”
complication.) Birds have been observed reconstructing cultural
information in complete isolation, meaning that culture can be
genetically encoded.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientists isolated a Zebra Finch,
preventing it from learning the songs of its parents (and probably
pissing off a bunch of PETA activists). These finches are known to learn their song from elder
male relatives, which is why the scientists were surprised to see the
same songs emerge from a colony of these utterly isolated birds.
They
didn’t get it right immediately. The first isolated bird, cut off from
its culture, emitted a cacophonous screeching about as melodious as
nails being dragged down a pieces of broken blackboard which were, in
turn, being dragged down an even larger blackboard. It even tried to
teach its kids the same, but they obviously thought “that sucks” (in
bird) and made a few improvements. After four generations, the
original finch songs reappeared, meaning that either
a) Cultural information can be genetically encoded or
b) Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has embarrassingly bad sound insulation.
We’re going to assume a) for now.
The
implications are enormous: the encoded information wasn’t immediately
available like some kind of genetic database, but as the baby birds
learned and improved what they saw they were all along being guided by
built-in information. At every point, if you’ll forgive the outrageous
anthropomorphization, they “thought” they were working it out for
themselves while dancing to the genetic tune. That’s the kind of thing
that would make you think very seriously about free will.
Even
better, imagine the interactions of such genetically-tuned tendencies
with a world full of things survival never had to deal with. The
evolutionary importance of mating songs can’t be overstated, so such
information being backed up in every single cell is understandable.
But what about innate tendencies like wanting to be popular or
successful, interacting with technologies which can send your image far
further than our cave-dwelling originators could ever imagine?
That
could lead to people doing the stupidest, most self-destructive things
just for the chance of a few minutes of fame and, oh, hang on. YouTube
and Reality TV just made a lot more sense to us. And that’s scary.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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