Gregory Kohn

Three guests, isn’t there enough disorder in this world.

The problem is that innateness is not a neutral concept. It hinders our understanding of ontogeny by posing as a developmental explanation when it is not. Showing that a behavior is predictable across space and time is informative, but it does not reveal how it developed.

But studying development prospectively is grueling and time-consuming. It's rooted in natural history, and fell outside the emphasis on Popperian falsifiable hypothesis testing. This left an opportunity for sociobiology to overlook past critiques and reintroduce innateness into animal behavior.

To truly understand the development of behavior, we have to observe the processes from the beginning. There is no way to predict what retroactive experiences might be causal. So we need to map out the details of the ontogenetic niches that capture a species' typical ontogenetic processes first.

Non-obvious factors guide development. Their existence challenged the retroactive view of development. This view posits that the presence of seemingly non-learned yet prepared responses to the environment is itself evidence of unobserved innate origins.

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In particular, they showed that all organisms are constantly interacting and learning from (in the broad sense) their environment. "Innate" behavior that emerges in the first few seconds after hatching still has a long developmental history. Experience is etched into the organism at conception.

At the same time, developmental psychobiologists showed that development is a radically non-linear, dynamic, and constructive process. This process depended on a network of reciprocal interactions between genes, the organism, and the environment, without prioritizing any of them.

From this, ethologists such as Patrick Bateson, Peter Klopfer, S. A. Barnett, and Jack P. Hailman showed how moving beyond the innate vs. learned dichotomy opened new avenues for investigating the evolution of behavior. Many of these research programs are now foundational.

These critiques (especially Lehrman's) convinced luminaries in ethology such as Niko Tinbergen--who pioneered the modern concept of innateness--that usage of innateness in animal behavior had reached its natural conclusion. Development overcame the dialectical opposition of innate vs. acquired.

Revisiting T. C. Schneirla’s “Interrelationships of the ‘Innate’ and the ‘Acquired’ in Instinctive Behavior” (1956) - Biological Theory During the postwar period, the concept of instinct came to encapsulate the debate around the importance of nature versus nurture. The fact that animals show highly organized behavior early in development suggested the presence of an underlying fixity where behavior was “inbuilt” into an animal’s biology despite an individual’s experiences. This placed a discrete and exhaustive line between the innate and acquired that became a foundation for the European-dominated field of ethology. Across the Atlantic, a group of comparative psychologists led by the American Museum of Natural History’s T. C. Schneirla contested this approach, proposing that the study of animal behavior should avoid abstract dichotomies with a renewed focus on developmental processes. While Schneirla’s theoretical and empirical work shaped the modern study of animal behavior, his legacy requires revisiting in an era where the nature versus nurture debate is regaining prominence. In this article, I revisit Schneirla’s approach to behavior with a focus on his paper “Interrelationships of the ‘Innate’ and the ‘Acquired’ in Instinctive Behavior” (published in M. Autuori et al. (1956) L’instinct dans le comportement des animaux et de l’homme; Masson, Paris, pp. 387–452) for the journal’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection; the paper is available as supplementary material in the online version of this article. A companion article (this issue; G. M. Kohn (2024) “A Discussion on Instinct, Paris, 1954”) presents the commentary that was published with it.

Innateness has been subjected to strong criticisms. A founder of the Animal Behavior Society, Ethel Tobach, along with Daniel Lehrman and their mentor T. C. Schneirla, convincingly argued that development could not be pigeonholed into such dichotomies. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds - Nature Ecology & Evolution Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Photo of Jane Goodall in the center, signing a book, with three women standing slightly hunched behind her. A very young Michelle is to the right, smiling.

As a primatologist, Jane Goodall was a huge inspiration to me. I admired the way she describes chimpanzee behavior with such detail and empathy, and she’s inspired so many people and advocated for chimpanzee conservation and welfare.

However, I'm dismayed at what her narrative leaves out (1/10)

אַ שיינעם דאנק. איך האב פאַלש געלייענט דעם ערשטן “טוויט” און נישט געזען אז דו האסט זיי געמאכט!

וואו האסטו דאס געקויפט? איך האב שטענדיג ליב געהאט דעם סימבאל פון דעם גאלדענעם פאוו.

The inherent values of observation and description: A case study in the spiny solanums of Australia Click on the article title to read more.

Fascinating essay by @martinebotany.bsky.social on spiny solanums (tomato et al. relatives) as an example of all the important natural history research left to be done. Great observations on pollination and symbiosis... A very inspiring Sunday morning read!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Trump's very first example of the Smithsonian's "corrosive ideology" was an exhibit that correctly stated "Race is a human invention." How is scientific consensus (that biological races don't exist in humans) corrosive? We are asking scientists to co-sign our statement: forms.gle/kqKQF9CZ3jPB...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Wohoo: @gjseverino.bsky.social's paper is accepted w minor revs in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences!

"Social Contingency in Embodied Neural Networks relies on Co-Constructed Dynamical Mechanisms"
Follow him + his insanely creative modeling research!

Link to paper forthcoming

Complex Dynamics of Social Learning in Groups of Wild Arabian Babblers | doi.org/10.1093/behe... | Behavioral Ecology | #ornithology 🪶

Conference title: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin, and image of Lewontin in Black and White with intense expression in front of a chalkboard holding up a fist, When and Where Friday, October 10, 2025 11:30 am to Sunday, October 12, 2025 2:00 pm Music Room (218) Goldring Student Centre 150 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5 | and online via Zoom

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin.

It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

It's the 125th birthday of the Workers Circle (@workerscircle.bsky.social‬)! Along with their social justice work, they also published Yiddish educational materials. The only zoology textbook in Yiddish, “The life of Animals”/ דאס לעבען פון חיות, was published by the Workers Circle in the 1920s.

Terrible picture, but it may be the best vagrant I’ve seen in my life. A Grey-tailed tattler, usually a bird of the pacific rim from Siberia to Australia was sighted at Huguenot memorial park in Florida.

An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion | doi.org/10.1002/ece3... | Ecology and Evolution | #ornithology 🪶

salvador allende, former president of chile

as always, on the 11th of september: allende vive.

Overview of the ROTO Lecture Series in the winter semester 2025/2026. The talks will be: - "Race Reification and Population Descriptors in Human Genomics" by Celso Neto (University of Exeter) - "Understanding plant holobionts through complexity science" by César Marín (Universidad Santo Tomás) - "What is Dialectical Biology?" by Chris Shambaugh (University of Oregon) - "Learning from Partial Overlaps Between Knowledge Systems" by Charbel El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia) - "21st century eugenics, scientific racism and the role of academia in promoting political ideology" by Rebecca Sear (Brunel University London) - "The Organism and the System: Boundary Crossings in 20th Century Science" by Libby O’Neil (Mississippi State University)

New semester, new lecture series 🎉Starting next month, we welcome amazing scholars to give online talks in the history and philosophy of life sciences. Find all dates and registration links here: rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture...
We look forward to seeing you there 🤗
#PhilSci #HistSci #HPBio

Tool use by a wild Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) We provide photographic documentation of an adult Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) in an apparent attempt to use a piece of bark to extract a spider that appeared to be hiding beneath a different pie...

Are they pretty similar to jays as well? I have been seeing increased observation of purported tool use in jays in the last few years (and they would be easier to keep in captivity). www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite scientists, thinkers, and writers of all time, Stephen Jay Gould. He would have been 84 year old. “Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.” -S. J. Gould

Really interesting study showing learning of tool use in carrion crows! www.cell.com/current-biol...

A complex social-acoustical environment supports development and maintenance in the zebra finch auditory pallium | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society Postnatal experience is critical to auditory development in vertebrates. The Australian zebra finch (Taeniopygia castanotis) provides a valuable model for understanding how complex social-acoustical e...

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I have seen Java sparrows attempt to mate with diamond doves, and it was essentially the same interaction you shared. I considered writing a brief communication report, but was unable to secure a clear enough video.