Culture may be coded in our DNA
Knowledge is passed down directly from generation to generation in the animal kingdom as parents teach their children the things they will need to survive. But a new study has found that, even when the chain is broken, nature sometimes finds a way.
Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations.
"We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome," said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of a study in Nature on Sunday.
This is very much in line with the
extended phenotype (please read the page in link) described by Richard Dawkins and which I find absolutely fascinating. An example is how birds instinctively know to make their nests, and each species makes its own unique nest, as if the nest's design was coded in their DNA. The same is true for rodents (rabbits, rats, marmots) making burrows/warrens without having to learn it from their parents. I have wondered myself if the facts that children have the innate instinct to pick up nice stones, use sticks to make makeshift camps or make a fort with blankets at home are behavioural traits encoded in human DNA since the Palaeolithic (probably even before the appearance of Homo sapiens). Children do not have to learn that and they do it all over the world, in every culture (as far as I know).
Yesterday
another study suggested that memories could be stored in the neurons nucleus and encoded by RNA. If that is confirmed, then it's only a small step to have innate a whole range of behaviour stored in our DNA. Judeo-Christian religions tried to make people believe we have a free-will and can control our behaviour, but it increasingly looks like most of the things we do are the result of how our genes interract with or respond to our environment. In other words, what we do is a set of semi-automated responses (including the way our mind processes information and develops an emotional response) predefined in our genome. In fact, it's pretty well established now that temperament and some traits of character are grounded in genetics. Innate behaviour is only an extension of one's temperament.
If interpersonal variations in character and behaviour are encoded in DNA, the gene pool of a particular country, region or ethnic group would more broadly explain some long-term cultural variations between these groups. I am not talking of culture as in arts (theatre, fashion, music and the like), but psychological culture, as in why the Germans and Japanese are very punctual and organised, the English highly value privacy, the French like to argue, the Scots, Dutch and Belgians are thrifty, the Spaniards and Portuguese are very sociable and go to bed late at night, and so on. These are almost certainly aspects of local cultures that are influences by different frequencies for some genes influencing behaviour in each population.
Add to that that epigenetics regulate the intensity of the predetermined set of responses stored in our DNA to adapt to the changes in the environment. It can even completely switch off, or on the contrary greatly intensify, some particular behavioural responses after a traumatic event, and those changes can be passed to the next generation. This is nature's way of quickly adapting to temporary environmental upheavals.
