Abstract
Among contemporary biologists, learning is often presumed to be an evolutionarily derived trait (Mayr, 1974;Dethier, 1978;Shepherd, 1983;but see Tierney, 1986). Yet, as the opening quote from Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy illustrates, early naturalists believed just the opposite. Lamarckians contended that instincts were derived from learned behavior. Their perspective was based on two basic observations made of learned and instinctive behavior. First, behavior regarded as instinctive was observed to be “automatic”; i.e., in a given individual, an instinctive behavior varied little in form from one time to the next. Second, behavior which was learned was observed to be rather variable at first but became increasingly automatic as the animal gained experience. It was commonly remarked that learned behavior eventually became as automatic as behavior termed instinctive.
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Papaj, D.R. (1993). Automatic Behavior and the Evolution of Instinct: Lessons From Learning in Parasitoids. In: Papaj, D.R., Lewis, A.C. (eds) Insect Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2814-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2814-2_10
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