While waiting for sleep to take me the other night, I was thinking about one of my old dogs and how she used to attack bees in the garden. She'd never been stung, but she would dart her face in and out of the bee's range like a fencer – slapping it down to the ground quickly with her paw and trying to kill it without touching its stinger (but she didn't do this with flies). I’ve seen other dogs display this type of behavior with snakes, too. This is knowledge. At least, I think I can say this is knowledge – albeit an 'instinctual' one – but that word doesn't explain much and it seems to be more than just, say, a physiological reaction to a scent. It strikes me as something distinct from what we get as a result of selective breeding, e.g. aggressive behavior, and it seems insufficient to label it as simply a reflex action.
My dog obviously didn't come to know that the bee can sting her through reason or through studying papers on them, but she had a well-founded fear that must have been attained, as far as I can tell, through some sort of genetic inheritance. That is to say, specific, hard-learned facts about the environment her ancestors lived in have been recorded and passed down to her in cells.
If this is a fact of other species then I see no reason why it might not apply to us, too. I wonder if specific experiences of parents can be 'recorded' and passed down to their children, and might that account for why people have seemingly irrational phobias? For instance, if a woman had terrible experiences in water from almost drowning, could her child be born with an inherent fear of water? Or clowns – perhaps some nutcase dressed up as a clown and gave her the ol' heave-ho. Is it possible that the child she bears also fears the sight of clowns?
I suppose it would be a lot easier to prevent these issues developing through early positive exposure and our ability to reason (or to preserve them if they're well founded), but it's interesting to me. I should ask a geneticist or biologist, I guess, as I’m probably sounding like an idiot.
