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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (391576)	12/12/2018 10:54:05 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 540748

Thanks for the reference. The research I was referring to involved more complex behavior that arguably is not a trait. I don't have it handy and I can't remember if it was ants or wild bees (or termites?). But what it said was that the colony had a choice of many foraging strategies to survive such as going deep or going wide to search for food. These became especially important at times of drought and there were many patterns associated with each major strategy. What the researchers found was that new colonies established by young queens carried the memories and strategies of their former colonies. This was more than just search patterns because it involved specific responses to specific conditions such as the relative position of the sun. It is possible the same mechanism is at work for the bees/ants as there is for nematodes you mentioned. But the behavior seems more complex. Epigenetic memory in humans seems weak and imo is more likely to be along the same lines as the nematode example. But I am only speculating. As a species, human evolution seems to follow the extreme opposite path to genetic memory. We are born very immature and our early childhood environment shapes us for life - allowing each generation to adapt to their specific environment and era. We are generalists to the extreme. On the other hand, there's certainly value in handing out hard learned time tested skills (e.g. which snakes are venomous) to a few generations down the line. I've often wondered about the optimal balance between having genetic memory and having a fresh start.