Instinctual Behavior Vs Intelligent Decisions

What you have described is by no means 'forbidden' by Darwinism, it is essentially an example of what Waddington called canalisation, the repeated behaviour forms the suitable environment to select for variations which promote that behaviour. Waddington further called the situation where an organism chooses its own environment to a degree or modifies that environment to its own ends 'The Exploitive System'.Waddington identified 4 systems involved in evolution, the exploitive system, the epigenetic system, the natural selective system and the genetic system.Of course whether such a thing would occur would be highly dependent on what the specific behaviour was and how it would become selectively advantageous. Mere repetition would not be sufficientTTFN,WK

Really? So it doesn't lead to changes in the behaviour of other bees or to changes in the availability of pollen depending on its accuracy? Care to provide any coherent and substantive support for this claim? The idea that the environment is trivial to any aspect of adaptive evolution is pretty much unsupportable, I'm interested to see how you go about it. An erroneous assumption when you realise that other members of a population constitute part of the environment, and even without that consideration the calim that it would take many generations to change the environment seems tenuous, do Beaver dams not affect the environment? Do they take generations to build? By learning, hence it originally being a learned behaviour. Organisms in a population can sometimes learn by observing other organisms in the population and this can occur transgenerationally when the generations coexist.I'll see if I can find any sort of example.TTFN,WK

Sure it can, by social transmission and potentially in the longer term by the sort of canalisation/genetic assimilation I described. Wow, whenever a creationist/IDist brings up epigentics nowadays it is like a homeopathy proponent bringing up quantum mechanics, its just a word they use, they clearly have no idea what it means and they assume no one else does either but feel it adds a lovely patina of sciencyness to their nonsense.Please provide a link to some research showing epigenetics mediating the inheritance of learned behaviour. If you can't then please stop pretending it exists. But then Darwin was wrong about a whole lot of stuff because for all his experiments in breeding he didn't really know anything about genetics.TTFN,WK

OK, so I told Zi Ko I would look for some examples of the sort of learned behaviour becoming instinctual that we discussed. What follows is a brief description of the first experimental example I have found (Moray and Connolly, 1963), sadly I believe the full text is behind a paywall.In this experiment flies were artificially selected over several rounds for and against an aversion to food flavoured with peppermint oil. The selected, and unselected, flies were then use to produce populations which were continued for multiple generations with selection applied at each generation. The populations were raised in 6 different conditions, flies averse to peppermint raised on normal food, flies non-averse to peppermint raised on normal food, unselected flies raise on normal food, flies averse to peppermint raised on peppermint food, flies non-averse to peppermint raised on peppermint food and unselected flies raise on peppermint food. Each generation the flies were tested for their aversion to peppermint.For those populations raised on normal food the levels of aversion stayed relatively consistent for over 10 generations. In the populations raised on peppermint however the averse population rapidly loses its aversion, reaching levels comparable with the non averse after only 3 generations. If the averse population is returned to normal food after only 3 generations then it will regain its aversion however if it is returned after 7 generations it will not and the no-averse behaviour persists.The authors explain this as a results of canalisation interacting with the strong selection for aversion applied to the population. This is perhaps a necessary conclusion since in the case of the unselected lines being raised on the peppermint food there seems to be no effect on their aversion!Whether this should really be considered a case of a learned behaviour, non-averse behaviour in the averse population, becoming an instictual one is debatable since there was clearly already some non-averse behaviour present in the variability of the original wild-type population.TTFN,WK

Well there is nothing suggesting it has never been observed to happen over many multi generational studies involving behaviour. What is the evidence for it? Oh no wait, there isn't any, you are still waiting for the scientific world to catch up with your vague musings. Still, at least you have Wikipedia to keep you up to date with cutting edge research.I present you a way learned behaviour can become genetically represented and you choose to ignore it in favour of your pipe dreams.TTFN,WK

Unfortunately this is once again getting into definitional issues. There is a paper "Are Complex Behaviors Specified by Dedicated Regulatory Genes? Reasoning from Drosophila" (Baker et al., 2001). from the title one might think this will clear the matter up, and this is the case if one is prepared to accept their definition of what constitutes a gene 'specifying' a behaviour. You should like the paper, it uses the word neural a lot, though sadly not the word empathy.If you find their definition acceptable I could provide some examples, I'm not sure what the actual access status of that paper is.TTFN,WK

I see no similarity between what you say and what Baker wrote, except that some of the same words are used.I'll try and post later with some of the examples from the paper.TTFN,WK