Quote Originally Posted by Mendel's Balls
Cellular memory, radical memory, radical cellular memory, past life memory, whatever you want to call it has nothing to do with Darwinism........

Our instinctual reaction to sakes and chimps’ instinctual response to snakes, in terms of Darwinism, would be explained by descent with modification (not cellular memory)

A valid articulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection would be something along the lines…..

Chimps and Humans are derived from an ancestral species....the population of that ancestral hominid species contained individuals with different genes...those members with genes that caused them to be jumpy around snakes survived and reproduced at greater rates than those that didn’t have these genes…..when the parent species gave rise to two daughter species these genetically wired instincts were maintained down the hominid family tree.

This is only one possible articulation of Darwinian perspective….not trying to piss anyone off….but lets not confuse ideas here.

_______________________________________________________________________

On a different note…….


Cellular memory itself is a confusing term…...to molecular, cellular, and developmental biologists it means a very specific thing (phenomena collectively known as epigenetics)

Cellular memory also could mean the radical overarching, pseudoscientific theories described here…….. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_memory ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_memory; http://skepdic.com/cellular.html


I'm not sure which one you two meant but nethier has very little to do with traditional Darwinism.

Good find on the livescience page!
Yeah, it is confusing, I guess mostly I was babbling and trying to figure out how instinct works exactly. I mean, I understand evolution in terms of physical development/natural selection and even in terms of cleverness, but I'd never thought about how exactly instincts develop... does that make sense?

I mean, on a completely different page from the reaction to snakes because the way you put it makes a lot of sense. A physical reaction that's favored by natural selection. That makes more sense to me now in terms of Darwin's theory. But that's more reflex than instinct, isn't it? The direction my brain started moving in was animals that migrate or just naturally know certain behaviors specific to their species... where's the line between instinct and reflex? It's completely off topic from the original stuff we were talking about, but I'm all curious now, lol. Cellular memory was a red herring, apparently .