Genetic memory - how we know things we’ve never learned

I had a very interesting conversation with my mother yesterday over coffee. Out of the blue, she thought of mentioning a conversation she had with my father probably some fifty years ago, obviously during an argument. ‘I asked him why did he marry me?’ - a valid question in a pretty stormy marriage. To which, my father replied - ‘Well, I figured out that with me being smarter, our children have a better chance of inheriting my intelligence’.
Certainly, the answer of an asshole - yet I cannot help wondering if my old man was on to something. My mother freely admits he was a very smart man and his genes are obvious in his children and grandkids. If you enjoy @honeydue’s writing, that’s where she gets it. In the age old debate of nature vs. nurture, I vote nature. If there’s a benefit in having a complicated family history and loads of step siblings, it is studying who got what traits from whom. In my own case, nurture played no role as my very smart father had left to spread his genes elsewhere.

I’m trying to understand this whole inherited traits problem as it comes close to something that has been on my mind lately - genetic memory and how we are born with pre-installed knowledge, that is not at all apparent in a newborn. The dominant theory is that babies are born with a blank slate, to be inscribed with things they are taught, personal experiences, in close relation to the environment in which they are raised. Little credit is given to the information that might already be coded in their DNA or RNA, of which, at the moment, we understand very little.

I’m not a scientist, but as an avid reader I came across this theory in several books I’ve read recently. One of them - ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear’ - a saga following the destiny of primitive people, which, besides being well-written, demonstrates a significant amount of research. The author’s theory is that our primitive ancestors, the Neanderthals, possessed this sort of genetic memory which allowed them to draw upon their ancestors’ acquired knowledge. For instance, the knowledge of which plants can cure what ailments - an art the medicine woman did not have to learn but rather remember, as the knowledge was already there.
As far as newborns are concerned we assume they’re born with a few instincts and not much else. Personally, I find the term ‘instinct’ conveniently vague, as it seems obvious that we’re talking about information that is hard-coded in the brain. A newborn will know to look for its mother’s breast even though during its first nine months it received nutrients via the umbilical cord.

A more troubling example of genetic memory is the way children learn how to read. Again, I will refer to a conversation I had many years ago with one of my many sisters. She and I have children of roughly the same age and during one chat we came to the conclusion that at some point our kids learned how to read, on their own. We both did our duty of providing books and teaching the alphabet, but we couldn’t pinpoint the moment they figured out reading. My belief is that we only provided the children with the tools necessary to bring up that memory of a skill they already possessed. This idea goes well with a theory put forth by famous linguist Noam Chomsky, according to whom human beings are born with an inherited knowledge of language structure which he calls ‘universal grammar’. Again, observing children learning to talk it’s easy to see they will learn how to make complex phrases way before going to school and learning about verbs and nouns - or Chomsky’s own transformational generative grammar, which plagued my college years and scarred me for life.
A child will know how to substitute a noun for another without any formal instruction in intricate grammar issues.
In the animal world, the case for genetic memory is even easier to argue. I once observed a pigeon building a nest in a nook outside my window and I asked myself how does it know how to choose a good location or what materials to use. A baby pigeon spends between 7 and 28 days in the nest before being able to fly out on its own and I don’t think the mother spends that short time teaching her offspring the art of nest building. ‘Listen, my daughter, when the time comes you need to pick up small twigs and avoid plastic crap humans litter the streets with as that is useless’. Not to mention teaching reproductive biology or ‘the facts of life’. Animals are born with all this complete knowledge - if they hadn’t they’d be dead.

In terms of genetic memory, one of the things that makes little sense is the very fact that humans are born rather helpless. Why would that be? Baby turtles know how to walk and find their way to the sea within minutes of being born, while it takes children roughly one year to learn to walk.
Some scientists believe humans are born with a smaller brain due to the fact we are bipedal creatures and the upright position makes the birth canal comparatively smaller than in animals walking on all fours. Somewhere on the evolutionary line, hominids had to adapt and give births to babies with smaller brains - with less capacity for genetic memory.
Finally, the best argument for genetic memory is that of the so-called savants, the autistic Rainman type - those with a hardcoded talent for mathematics or playing an instrument, without being taught.
We spend a lot of time trying to understand human psychology and mating behavior, we speak of pheromones and body-shape signaling good fertility in a woman. What if on a deeper level there’s also the question of the male with worthy genes attracting more females, simply because it makes sense on an evolutionary level.The species will be better served if males with a good genetic memory package get to spread it around. And it’s not just about intelligence, there are many other traits needed for the survival of the species. For all our refined modern civilization, the times when survival meant the force and cunning needed to hunt a mammoth are not that far behind us.

Thanks for reading

Images: 1, 2, 3.