(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Monarch butterflies and salmon navigate thousands of miles. In fact, the butterflies require three generations to get to their destination. How do just-born butterflies know they all must complete this journey, know how to do it, know when and how to return?
Animals use methods that human beings eventually worked out for ourselves, like dead reckoning, sun polarization, spherical geometry and path integration. Animals keep track of their position and the distance they've gone with some program in their tiny brains. Humans use millions of lines of computer code to program similar navigation.
Genetic inheritance is easy to understand if we're talking about the color of a bird's beak, or something like that. But . . what about a command to fly to a certain location in Mexico? Or instructions on how to get there, not on roads but in mid-air?
Charles Darwin couldn't explain this sort of in-born behavior in animals within his theory of evolution. In his Origin of Species he said that instincts are such a mystery that their origin would strike many “as a difficulty sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.”
from Mindmatters
(cont'd tomorrow)
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